The Cinematheque

“The strongest, most surprising, most innovative, most accomplished of all Pialat’s films … No other French film is such a mine of information about class, living arrangements, clothes, what people earn, and family relationships.”

Jacques Siclier, Le Monde

Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu ​“radiate the most dangerously anarchic sexuality one can imagine” (Andrew Sarris, Village Voice) in Maurice Pialat’s unsettling tale of erotic obsession. Huppert plays Nelly, a refined bourgeois woman who dumps her respectable partner for unbridled sex and utter irresponsibility with Loulou, a loutish layabout played by Depardieu. Guy Marchand co-stars as the spurned André, an advertising executive at a loss to understand what Nelly and Loulou could possibly have in common. Pialat’s gift for combining storytelling with social observation has drawn frequent comparisons to Émile Zola; here, in a handheld portrait of lust across the class divide, observed with an almost ethnographic sense of immersion and impartiality, one can see why. Loulou includes various moments of unscripted interruption or accident preserved for authenticity. ​“In Pialat’s films there’s no border between reality and fiction,” said Huppert.

In French with English subtitles

“As fresh and unsettling today as it was in 1980 … To see the movie again is to realize how few filmmakers in the intervening years have even attempted to chart the vast intricacies, the sparks and synapses, of sexual passion and the particular nature of women’s desire.”

Molly Haskell, Film Comment

“A study in erotic revolution; in it, sex becomes a force that shatters not only class allegiances and social patterns but even the order represented by traditional narrative structure … It’s one of the most original French films of the period, and, I think, a great one.”

Dave Kehr, Chicago Reader