Cinema: Love and Death

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LOULOU Directed by Maurice Pialat Screenplay by Arlette Langmann and Maurice Pialat

French Director Maurice Pialat sits behind his camera like a bacteriologist at his microscope, waiting patiently for his subjects to squirm to life. He does not argue or judge; he observes and classifies. In 13 years he has made but five films, each dissecting the lives of the French working class at a crisis point: the onset of adolescence, the breakup of a marriage, the end of a life. His best film, The Mouth Agape (1974), traced a woman's slow, painful death and its effect on her husband and her son. The film was slow and painful, and almost heroic in its unflinching compassion. Now, in Loulou, Pialat tells the story of an arrogant wastrel (Gerard Depardieu) and his sexual hold on a middle-class woman (Isabelle Huppert). She rejects the wimpy masochism of her petulant lover for the violent energies of the world's greatest stud. Last Tango, Take 2.

This is, potentially, hot stuff. But Depardieu and Huppert, who at least on paper would seem to make a pretty erotic combination, refuse to strike sparks. Depardieu has played this part before, and now looks to have played it out. Huppert, with the freckled, enigmatic face of a sullen schoolgirl, is a tabula rosé on which other directors have written personality. But Pialat is too reticent to give her dramatic motivation, and Huppert is too self-enclosed to convey the orgasmic release that would give her character, and the film, a little life. Alas, Loulou is a corpse, and here Pialat has only graduated from sympathetic scientist to a coroner of sexual obsession. —R.C.