Learn about our streaming media
Now Playing:Up Next:
View our complete schedule
There are many ways to support Chicago Public Radio.Learn how to support Chicago Public Radio
1:44 PM CST
|
|
|
Learn about our streaming media |
|
Now Playing: Up Next: View our complete schedule |
|
There are many ways to support Chicago Public Radio. Learn how to support Chicago Public Radio |
|
Aug 28, 2008 1:44 PM CST |
|
|
|
|
||||||||
| Programs |  |
Events | |
Listener Services | |
About Us | |
Press Room | |
Contact Us |
|
Maurice Pialat is huge in France. An important, essential, much-written about film director. In the U.S., you might well ask: Maurice who? Well, Pialat is dead, so we can talk about him without fear. By all accounts, he could be difficult and abrasive. His movie sets sometimes became battlegrounds. When he won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival for his film Under the Sun of Satan, the audience booed. You can find the pictures of Pialat on a Pialat Web site, hand raised, with a bemused Catherine Deneuve standing in the background, as he yelled at the audience, “Well, I don’t like you either.” But if you get over this gossip and take Pialat on his own terms, you may be in for a rude awakening. Pialat was a painter, in addition to being a filmmaker. He discovered Sandrine Bonnaire and often worked with Gerard Depardieu. Take Pialat’s 1985 film, Police. On the surface, it’s a genre film. Depardieu plays Mangin, a Parisian detective. He is much more complicated than most movie Police detectives. He is by turn big, brutal, sensitive, overbearing, playful. On a case which involves a band of Arab drug dealers, he meets the stunningly sexy Noria, played by Sophie Marceau. Noria draws him into a complicated web involving heroin and 200,000 in cash. But in a way, this is all surface, because Pialat’s films are often about something else entirely than the story or subject. What interests him are the bonds and relationships between people. He is a kind of analyst trying to make his camera capture a distillation of raw emotion. In Police, this involves a handheld camera; a gritty, almost claustrophobic documentary feel; a sense of nervous agitation; choppy editing; a sense that every scene is improvised. Depardieu, the detective, is like a pent-up animal, aggressive in one moment and tender in the next, in a performance which is nothing short of brilliant. In the controversial Under the Sun of Satan, adapted from a novel by George Bernanos, we again get Depardieu, but this time as a priest who is exiled by his church to a small village. There, he meets his match. She is a promiscuous, amoral teenager named Mouchette, played by Sandrine Bonnaire. Pregnant and with a financially strapped aristocratic lover, she is taken in by a married deputy minister who is fatally shot. The priest, by contrast, descends further into self-mortifying alienation. When the priest is sent to a neighboring town to assist in a confession, he gets lost, and in his delirium, becomes aware of Satan alongside him. Satan is in the form of a traveling horse dealer. He tests the priest’s faith by giving him the ability to see clearly into the human soul. With the grace and burden of this insight, the tormented priest encounters mutual salvation and redemption in the desperate Mouchette. In Under the Sun of Satan, Pialat gives us a contrast of visual tones and textures as he dissects the two parallel journeys: that of Mouchette and the priest. Yet Pialat is not interested in a resolution of the spiritual quests. There is no transcendence here, but a vivid and visceral portrait of two human souls in an equally desperate struggle for existence. These themes are perhaps too classical for modern taste, but what makes them so arresting is Pialat’s ability to contemporize them with a sense of immediacy. His unsettling, sometimes relentlessly focused visual style is balanced by astonishingly raw acting performances. As a spectator, you forget the divide between the image and the audience. Pialat succeeds in putting you inside the film, as it were, a viewer whose eyes are taped wide open. Every scene in a Pialat film is on edge—as if it were to disintegrate into catastrophe at any moment. This gives his films, which are often made up of very ordinary events, a transformative dimension because Pialat reveals that even these ordinary events have the deep undercurrent of the unconscious. The cinema, he said, transforms what is sordid into something marvelous, it makes the ordinary exceptional. This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview. Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia. |
|
|
|
©1998-2006 WBEZ Alliance, Inc. All rights reserved. | |
|
|||
