The Cinematheque

“An instant classic … A most eloquent film about life and death [that] probably says more about this theme than any other, including the Ingmar Bergman hit Cries and Whispers.”

Gene Moskowitz, Variety

“A total masterpiece … Devastating in its emotional precision” (David Thompson, Film Comment), The Mouth Agape, Maurice Pialat’s third feature, is an unflinching account of a middle-aged woman’s discovery that she has cancer and the effect this has on her family. Her husband of 34 years is a philandering alcoholic. Her aloof but dutiful son is a Parisian womanizer whose wife harbours resentment toward her terminally ill mother-in-law. Pialat’s semi-autobiographical tale is set in his home region of Auvergne and based on his mother’s illness. Intense, insightful, compassionate, rigorous, remarkably unsentimental, and occasionally humorous, The Mouth Agape is distinguished by fine ensemble performances, and by the sensitive cinematography of master cameraman Néstor Almendros (a Truffaut and Rohmer regular who worked just this once with Pialat).

In French with English subtitles

“Unforgettable … [Pialat] more than justifies his use of a forbidding subject. He has ideas about how emotions involving sex and death are intimately related and about the clarity and lack of it they shed on everything else.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Time Out

“Working with Pialat is exhausting. But the reward is the certainty of having collaborated with an artist whose independence and sincerity are carried almost to the point of madness.”

Néstor Almendros