Loulou (1980)
Directed by Maurice Pialat

Film Review

Maurice Pialat's Loulou probably rates as the most important French film of the 1980s.  The film certainly marked something of a watershed in Pialat's career, earning him international renown and establishing him as one of France's leading auteur filmmakers.  More crucially it provided a catalyst for what would become the most substantial and far-reaching shake-up in French cinema since the New Wave of the 1950s and 60s.  With a sudden insurgence of new talent, backed up by generous state subsidies, France in the 1980s was to become a fertile breeding ground for auteur cinema, creating the healthy dichotomy (art house alongside commercial cinema) that continues to define French cinema to this day.  Pialat was by no means the only maverick filmmaker to bring about this state of affairs but he was one of the most important.  Beineix, Carax and Besson would each have a sporadic impact with their stylised cinéma du look but Pialat's near-the-knuckle cinéma vérité would prove to be more enduring, its influence still felt in much of the realist cinema that is made in France today.

Throughout his career Maurice Pialat was obsessively dedicated to one goal, capturing the essence of life in his art.  It was a personal quest that earned him few friends and made him a controversial figure, loved by some, loathed by many.  Loulou was, in many respects, a continuation of Passe ton bac d'abord (1979), a film in which Pialat powerfully evoked the frustration and insecurity of the young at at time of mass unemployment in France.  In Loulou, the classic love triangle serves as a metaphor for a society that was still rigidly divided along class lines.  The choice faced by the lead female protagonist Nelly is between a life of bourgeois comfort and security that lacks real fulfilment and one in which the pursuit of economic well-being is sacrificed for personal happiness and freedom.  The two male characters, Loulou and André, are flagrant stereotypes - the one a hedonistic, irresponsible layabout, the other a prim middle-class Mr Average - but they provide the most succinct representation of the social demarcation of 1980s France.

In a similar vein to Pialat's earlier Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble (1972) Loulou has a strong autobiographical component.   Pialat and his co-screenwriter Arlette Langmann developed the story from an episode in their life, in which Langmann left Pialat to pursue an intense but short-lived love affair with another man.  On this occasion, once the narrative outline had been established, Pialat was far less clear in his mind as to how the film should be made.  As a consequence, Loulou was to be one of his most troubled productions, one in which he tested the patience of his cast, his technical crew and his producers to the absolute limit, and came perilously close to failing to complete the film.  It was a miracle that it ever made it to the cinema screens.

To say that that Pialat's working relationship with his lead actor Gérard Depardieu got off to bad start is understating things somewhat.  Unable to give his actors a clear steer as to what he wanted, and all too ready to dish out scalding hot criticism to all and sundry when he failed to get anything less than one hundred per cent commitment, Pialat had no trouble alienating his principal performers, especially the laid-back nouvelle vedette Depardieu, whom he considered lazy and unprofessional.  Pialat made a habit of wandering off, leaving everyone in the lurch, and would never take the trouble to give his actors a clear statement of what he was expecting of them.  The making of Loulou was an exercise in creative chaos in which Depardieu and his co-stars, Isabelle Huppert and Guy Marchard, were all pushed to their limits by the hardest of task-masters.  The pain was almost unendurable (none of these actors minces his or her words when they speak about working with Pialat) but the effort was worth it.  In no other film has any of these actors given a performance that is so utterly raw and uncompromisingly truthful.  By the end of a murderously intense two-month shooting stint Depardieu had warmed considerably towards Pialat and they would subsequently work together on three other films, including the box office hit Police (1985) and highly acclaimed Sous le soleil de Satan (1987).

Complementing the gruelling authenticity of the performances is some remarkably fluid camera work which both anchors the drama in the closest approximation to life as we know it (as opposed to the synthetic Hollywood-like substitute) and gives the film its distinctive austere poetry.  With little in the way of narrative it is the endlessly roving, constantly probing camera that ties the fragmented snatches of life together into a coherent whole.  The result is far nearer to a chaotically thrown together fly-on-the-wall documentary than scripted drama - which is hardly surprising given that virtually every scene was improvised with the minimum of directorial input, including the famous scene in which the bed collapses under Huppert and Depardieu.

Perhaps the most astonishing thing about Loulou is how it fared with an enforced change of cinematographer part-way though its production, a recipe for disaster if ever there was one.  When Pierre-William Glenn was called away just before the final scenes were due to be shot, Jacques Loiseleux stepped into the breach and the change is virtually imperceptible.  Another near-fatal blow came when Pialat was unable to complete the film as planned, owing to the fact that both Depardieu and Huppert were unable to prolong their stay as they had commitments on other films (Michael Cimino's blockbuster-to-end-all-blockbusters Heaven's Gate in the case of Huppert).  Pialat persuaded his producers to allow him to shoot the 'missing scenes' at a later date, without which the film would probably have never secured a commercial release.

Although Loulou was warmly received by most critics on its initial release in 1980 it failed to achieve anything like the box office receipts its producers had anticipated.  In France, the film attracted an audience of just under a million, and it failed to win an award despite being nominated for three Césars in 1981.  The film may not have been an unqualified success but it captured the mood of the time and had a significant impact on the careers of its director and two lead actors.  After Loulou, Gérard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert were soon established as two of French cinema's most important stars and Pialat would go on to make his most commercially successful and most highly regarded films. 

Loulou was a cinematic milestone that helped to knock French cinema out of its complacency in the early 1980s and secured a lasting place for the auteur in one of the world's most successful film industries.  On the artistic side, Loulou is a superbly executed, monstrously daring attempt to reflect wider social concerns through an intimate slice-of-life drama.  Lacking all but the most basic attempt at a narrative structure the film can be a challenge to watch but for those who fall under its strange spell it can be an eye-opening and enchanting experience.  Loulou is the most tragic, the most bitterly ironic of all Pialat's films, and possibly the greatest.

Film Synopsis

Nelly is a liberated young woman who enjoys a comfortable bourgeois existence with her partner André but somehow she feels there is something missing in her life.  That mysterious something she finds in Loulou, a 20-something drifter who has a chronic aversion to work.  After a violent break-up with André Nelly embarks on an idyllic love affair with Loulou, finding happiness in a life that is free of the constraints of conventional middle-class living.  As the realities of this new mode of existence begin to hit home it isn't long before disillusionment sets in.  Nelly doesn't mind sponging off André to obtain the money that Loulou is incapable of earning to pay for the rent and other basic necessities.  But when she becomes pregnant a primitive hand-to-mouth future with Loulou suddenly appears less attractive...