Loulou
Maurice Pialat (1925-2003) was one of the best French directors of the post-New Wave period. His unsentimental Loulou (1980), starring Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu, was a masterpiece of naturalism set amongst the minor bars, cafes, and nightclubs of modern working-class Paris. Called “the French Cassavettes” by Film Comment a year after his death, Pialat’s movies focused on the subtle charms of his downtrodden characters and were marked with the feeling of real life: however inconsistent, vague, strange, contingent that real life may be. Though he achieved greater recognition for A Nos Amours (1983) with Sandrine Bonnaire and Sous le Soleil de Satan (1987) with Bonnaire and Depardieu (as a Catholic priest), it was Loulou’s palate of muted blues and grays that helped give this film such long lasting affect--as well as the fact that it was based on his own relationship with the film's writer Arlette Langman, who left her husband to live with Pialat. Depardieu and Huppert are at their best. They had worked together before, in Bertrand Blier’s all-but-forgotten 1974 Les Valseuses (Going Places) with Miou-Miou and Jeanne Moreau. In Loulou, Huppert's married, middle-class Nelly meets Depardieu's local playboy and ex-con Louis (Loulou) on the dancefloor of a 
neighborhood disco. After an encounter with her insufferable, balding husband (played admirably by Andre Marchand), Nelly and Loulou spend the night fucking in a cheap hotel room, breaking the bed under Depardieu's considerable weight (this scene was probably improvised), and discussing what she will tell her husband in the morning. Nelly escapes the petty violence of her husband (his best line: "music bores me") and begins living with unemployed Loulou at a hotel which she of course pays for. Depardieu had, by 1980, perfected the role of the charming
thug with an idiosyncratic nobility (Barbet Schroeder's brilliant 1976 Maitress with Bulle Ogier, for example). In one scene Loulou considers pimping his new girlfriend, but leaves the decision totally up to her. In another he offers his mother, who is a maid at an office building, some of Nelly's money. Though told from Huppert's perspective, from the beginning--when Loulou brushes off the petulant Dominique (played by Frederique Cerbonnet) to when he is knifed outside the Bar L'Oasis yet enjoys his time in the hospital (the wheelchair was fun)--the film was Depardieu's, as the title makes clear. It is at its best in its moments of random humor, particularly: the saxophone, Big-Ass Marite, the old lady with the mailbox, the stuffed tomatoes, the girl with the cat, the strange scene when housesitting a friend's apartment.
Maurice Pialat (1925-2003) was one of the best French directors of the post-New Wave period. His unsentimental Loulou (1980), starring Isabelle Huppert and Gerard Depardieu, was a masterpiece of naturalism set amongst the minor bars, cafes, and nightclubs of modern working-class Paris. Called “the French Cassavettes” by Film Comment a year after his death, Pialat’s movies focused on the subtle charms of his downtrodden characters and were marked with the feeling of real life: however inconsistent, vague, strange, contingent that real life may be. Though he achieved greater recognition for A Nos Amours (1983) with Sandrine Bonnaire and Sous le Soleil de Satan (1987) with Bonnaire and Depardieu (as a Catholic priest), it was Loulou’s palate of muted blues and grays that helped give this film such long lasting affect--as well as the fact that it was based on his own relationship with the film's writer Arlette Langman, who left her husband to live with Pialat. Depardieu and Huppert are at their best. They had worked together before, in Bertrand Blier’s all-but-forgotten 1974 Les Valseuses (Going Places) with Miou-Miou and Jeanne Moreau. In Loulou, Huppert's married, middle-class Nelly meets Depardieu's local playboy and ex-con Louis (Loulou) on the dancefloor of a 
neighborhood disco. After an encounter with her insufferable, balding husband (played admirably by Andre Marchand), Nelly and Loulou spend the night fucking in a cheap hotel room, breaking the bed under Depardieu's considerable weight (this scene was probably improvised), and discussing what she will tell her husband in the morning. Nelly escapes the petty violence of her husband (his best line: "music bores me") and begins living with unemployed Loulou at a hotel which she of course pays for. Depardieu had, by 1980, perfected the role of the charming
thug with an idiosyncratic nobility (Barbet Schroeder's brilliant 1976 Maitress with Bulle Ogier, for example). In one scene Loulou considers pimping his new girlfriend, but leaves the decision totally up to her. In another he offers his mother, who is a maid at an office building, some of Nelly's money. Though told from Huppert's perspective, from the beginning--when Loulou brushes off the petulant Dominique (played by Frederique Cerbonnet) to when he is knifed outside the Bar L'Oasis yet enjoys his time in the hospital (the wheelchair was fun)--the film was Depardieu's, as the title makes clear. It is at its best in its moments of random humor, particularly: the saxophone, Big-Ass Marite, the old lady with the mailbox, the stuffed tomatoes, the girl with the cat, the strange scene when housesitting a friend's apartment.
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