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| Nathalie Baye, Monique Mélinand, and Philippe Léotard in The Mouth Agape |
Cast: Nathalie Baye, Philippe Léotard, Hubert Deschamps, Monique Mélinand. Screenplay: Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Néstor Almendros. Production design: Michel de Broin. Film editing: Bernard Dubois, Arlette Langmann.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross's familiar list of the five stages of grief -- Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance -- omits one that's featured in Maurice Pialat's The Mouth Agape: Impatience. Granted, it's antecedent to the others, and is usually present mainly when the person takes a long time dying. But it's a very real stage in Pialat's film, voiced primarily by the dying woman's husband and then only with guilt and embarrassment, made more poignant by the fact that he has cheated on her throughout their life together. There's nothing particularly admirable about the family of the dying woman (Monique Mélinand). Her husband (Hubert Deschamps), who continually has a cigarette in the corner of his mouth, feels up a pretty young girl who comes in to buy a T-shirt from his shop while his wife is dying in a nearby room. Their son (Philippe Léotard) is also unfaithful to his wife (Nathalie Baye), who goes off on vacation while he's watching after his mother. And yet, although The Mouth Agape takes a cold-hearted look at dying, treating it almost as an imposition on the living, the film somehow becomes more moving than the ones that sentimentalize the vigil at the bedside. The grief that the husband feels after her death is genuine, made more apparent by the way Pialat ends the film: first with a long tracking shot from the car carrying the son and daughter-in-law to Paris, where their lives will continue. We see the door that the father has just closed and then the streets of the village and finally the road to the city, receding as if the couple is escaping the trauma of death. And then we cut to an interior shot of the father turning out the light, enveloping him in darkness and loneliness.
