Maurice Pialat (review)

Maurice Pialat's assiduously cultivated reputation as enfant terrible of French film-making from the 1970s onwards has combined with the inaccessibility of many of his films in English-speaking countries to marginalize a powerful and significant body of work. His death in 2003 led to a retrospective and the issue of the complete works on DVD in France, but only now has he generated an English-language monograph, in which Marja Warehime ably contextualizes the work of one who so often set himself up as unclassifiable. Pialat is seen as drawing on a number of currents in French cinema, primarily the artisanal tradition de qualité epitomized by Carné and the improvisatory auteurship of Renoir — a dual filiation that brings into focus the importance of the father-and-son trope for his life and work. The comparison with Bresson, perhaps inevitable given both directors' adaptation of Bernanos, becomes more of a contrast, unsurprisingly given the older filmmaker's determined anti-naturalism and the spiritual dimension to his work. Among the New Wave film-makers who were Pialat's biographical contemporaries — though emphatically not his 'brothers' — Chabrol might appear to be the most akin, but Warehime goes so far as to describe Pialat as 'an anti-Chabrol' (p. 29), primarily because his work avoids the bourgeoisie to which he nevertheless belonged. A chronological survey of Pialat's ten feature films — a slender output for one not generally regarded as a minimalist director — gives thorough accounts and analyses, paying due heed to the fact that many Anglo-American readers will have had little or no opportunity to see many of the works analysed. If from time to time 'work' and 'life' are a trifle unproblematically conflated, this is because Pialat's choice of actors, of names for his characters and of locales make separation between the two difficult in the light of his well-documented biography. The 'place in a larger family history' (p. 163) with which Warehime's analysis concludes is also that she gives to Pialat, placing his work (perhaps in spite of himself) in a variety of overlapping contexts. The book, as usual with this series, is well presented, though Brigitte Roüan's name is disconcertingly given as 'Rohan' and there are an annoying number of 'sentences' beginning with 'Although' in which one waits in vain for the main verb. It is to be hoped that Warehime's work may help to make more Pialat films available on DVD in anglo-phone countries.