Graduate First (Maurice Pialat, 1978)

Cast: Sabine Haudepin, Philippe Marlaud, Annick Alane, Michel Caron, Christian Bouillette, Bernard Tronczyk, Patrick Lepcynski, Valérie Chassigneux, Jean-François Adam, Agnès Makowiak, Charline Pourré, Patrick Playez, Muriel Lacroix, Frédérique Cerbonnet, Fabienne Neuville, Aline Fayard. Screenplay: Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Pierre-William Glenn. Film editing: Sophie Coussin, Martine Giordano, Arlette Langmann. Music: Voyage. 

The baccalauréat, or the bac, is the French rite of passage into adulthood referred to in the title of Maurice Pialat's Passe ton bac d'abord, or Graduate First, a docufictional slice of life centered on the 19-year-olds of the town of Lens in northern France. Pialat employs a mix of professional and non-professional actors to suggest that this emergence from the crucible of secondary school and adolescence is not exactly the joyous event it's celebrated as, especially in a place like Lens, an economically depressed former coal mining town. The choices for post-graduate life boil down to marriage, marginal employment, the dole, or escape, and Pialat's film views all of those options with a melancholy eye. Graduate First is not without its comic moments, especially in its view of the clumsiness of adolescence and the incomprehension of elders, but the attempt to tell too many stories makes for a scattered film.

Under the Sun of Satan (Maurice Pialat, 1987)

Gérard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire in Under the Sun of Satan

Cast: Gérard Depardieu, Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Alain Artur, Yann Dedet, Brigitte Legendre, Jean-Claude Bouriat, Jean-Christophe Bouvet. Screenplay: Sylvie Pialat, Maurice Pialat, based on a novel by Georges Bernanos. Cinematography: Willy Kurant. Production design: Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet. Music: Henri Dutilleux. 

Are the torments that afflict the priest played by Gérard Depardieu in Maurice Pialat's Under the Sun of Satan mental or spiritual? And is there a difference? That's the conundrum the film leaves us to ponder and the reason the film caused so much uproar when it won the Palme d'Or at Cannes. It's a tense, talky film that begins with the young priest, Donnisan, confessing his self-doubt and feelings of inadequacy to his superior, Menou-Segret (Pialat), who is shocked to find that Donnisan wears a hair shirt under his cassock -- he also secretly flagellates himself. Then the film shifts to Mouchette (Sandrine Bonnaire), a 16-year-old girl with two lovers. She visits the first, Cadignan (Alain Artur) to tell him that she's pregnant and then, playing with his rifle, shoots him. Then she has sex with the other, a physician named Gallet (Yann Dedet), who has examined Cadignan's body and ruled the death a suicide. He tells her that he won't perform an abortion for her. The stories of Donnisan and Mouchette will intersect eventually, but not before the priest experiences a dark night of the soul in an encounter with the devil. Donnisan is transformed but destroyed by this meeting. The denouement, in which Donnisan seems to perform a miracle, has caused the film to be likened to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet (1955), but Pialat's work is messier than Dreyer's.   

Van Gogh (Maurice Pialat, 1991)

Jacques Dutronc in Van Gogh

Cast: Jacques Dutronc, Alexandra London, Bernard Le Coq, Gérard Sèty, Corinne Bourdon, Elsa Zylberstein, Leslie Azzoulai, Jacques Vidal, Chantal Barbarit, Claudine Ducret, Frédéric Bonpart. Screenplay: Maurice PIalat. Cinematography: Gilles Henry, Jacques Loiseleux, Emmanuel Machuel. Production design: Philippe Pallut, Katia Wyszkop. Film editing: Yann Dedet, Nathalie Hubert, Hélène Viard. 

Maurice Pialat's avoidance of melodrama, sentimentality, and biopic clichés makes his Van Gogh an exceptional contribution to the flood of films about the life and death of the artist. Pialat even avoids the one fact that everyone seems to know about Vincent Van Gogh: the mutilation of an ear. There's a passing reference to it, but no prosthetic has been attached to Jacques Dutronc's head to represent it. Pialat is as much concerned with the milieu, the village of Auvers-sur-Oise and the vie bohème of Paris, as he is with the facts of Van Gogh's last days. And by casting Dutronc, better known as a singer, in the role, he avoids the "movie star syndrome" that tainted the characterization when the part was played by Kirk Douglas in Lust for Life (Vincente Minnelli, 1956), Willem Dafoe in At Eternity's Gate (Julian Schnabel, 2016), and Tim Roth in Vincent & Theo (Robert Altman, 1990): We don't have to filter Van Gogh through our familiarity with the actor. Pialat also avoids focusing on the pictures themselves: He wants us to see the man more than the paintings. The result is occasionally frustrating. Pialat is fond of jump cuts that leave us momentarily trying to figure out where and when we are, and though the scene set in a Montmartre brothel that serves as a kind of climax to the film is exhilarating, it feels like an overextended set piece rather than an integral part of Van Gogh's story. But I know of no film that gives a richer sense of the world in which Van Gogh and his contemporaries -- the movie verbally and visually invokes Cézanne, Renoir, Lautrec, and others -- lived and worked. 

The Mouth Agape (Maurice Pialat, 1974)

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. 

We Won't Grow Old Together (Maurice Pialat, 1972)

Marlène Jobert and Jean Yanne in We Won't Grow Old Together

Cast: Marlène Jobert, Jean Yanne, Christine Fabréga, Patricia Pierangeli, Jacques Galland, Maurice Risch, Harry-Max, Muse Dalbray, Macha Méril. Screenplay: Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Luciano Tovoli. Film editing: Bernard Dubois, Arlette Langmann. 

Now that all relationships between (and among) consenting adults can no longer be called "perverse," it's hard to find a word for that of Catherine (Marlène Jobert) and Jean (Jean Yanne) in Maurice Pialat's We Won't Grow Old Together. "Dysfunctional" comes to mind, although it has apparently been functioning for six years before we encounter them. "Sadomasochistic" is a little too clinical and reductive for their on-again, off-again pairing. Separately, it's easier to categorize Jean as a jerk and Catherine as a doormat, except that there's something larger and deeper about both of them. In the astonishing scene in which Catherine sits blank-faced while Jean spews out a torrent of abuse, denouncing everything about her from her looks to her family to aimlessness in life, we project our own emotions about what it would be like to undergo such a barrage of insults, only to realize that her blankness, her lack of affect, her failure to fight back, is a way of asserting her control over him. When we meet Jean's beautiful, competent, and independent wife, Françoise (Macha Méril), we realize that his urge to dominate and abuse Catherine stems from a sense of his own inadequacy. We Won't Grow Old Together, a title that admits failure from the outset, is a complex psychological portrait, perhaps too complex for the medium of film, which makes it at once fascinating and abhorrent. 

À Nos Amours (Maurice Pialat, 1983)

Sandrine Bonnaire and Maurice Pialat in À Nos Amours

Cast: Sandrine Bonnaire, Maurice Pialat, Christophe Odent, Dominique Bresnehard, Cyril Collard, Cyr Boitard, Jacques Fischi, Valérie Schlumberger, Evelyne Ker, Pierre Novion, Tsilka Theodoru. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Jacques Loiseleux. Production design: Jean-Paul Camail, Arlette Langmann. Film editing: Valérie Condroyer, Sophie Coussin, Yann Dedet. 

Maurice Pialat is one of those directors who don't make it easy for viewers. He likes jump cuts from time to place that keep you slightly off-balance, and he seems to be obsessed with dysfunction. Not that À Nos Amours is hard to follow or hard to watch. It's graced with a skillful performance by Sandrine Bonnaire, making her screen debut in the key role of Suzanne, the teenage daughter in a family so volatile that it sometimes erupts into blows. Pialat himself plays the father, who finally gets so fed up with his wife (Evelyne Ker) and his dilettantish son (Dominique Bresnehard) that he abandons them -- not before knocking them around a few times. In response to this family craziness, Suzanne turns promiscuous, ignoring the attentions of Luc (Cyr Boitard), who loves her, and sleeping around until she finally decides to marry Jean-Pierre (Cyril Collard), though at the end of the film she has left him and is off to America. There's a raw immediacy to the film, created in part by Pialat's indifference to conventional exposition and transitions, so that we often feel as if we've been thrust into rooms to which we haven't been invited. 

L'Enfance Nue (Maurice Pialat, 1968)

Michel Terrazon and Marie Marc in L'Enfance Nue

Cast: Michel Terrazon, Linda Gutenberg, Raoul Billerey, Pierrette Deplanque, Marie-Louise Thierry, René Thierry, Henri Puff, Marie Marc, Maurice Coussonneau. Screenplay: Arlette Langmann, Maurice Pialat. Cinematography: Claude Beausoleil. No credited production designer or film editor. 

L'Enfance Nue is as straightforward and unadorned a portrait of a dysfunctional childhood as you're likely to see, with no special pleading, no excuses or indictments. Young François (Michel Terrazon) does some bad things: He kills a cat (though he first tries to nurse the wounded animal), he steals compulsively, and he helps cause a serious automobile accident. But we also see that he's capable of affection, especially to the aged Meme (Marie Marc) in the second foster family to which he's posted. (Even then, he swipes money from the coin purse under her pillow.) Yet there's no attempt on the part of director Maurice Pialat to sentimentalize him, or even to manipulate our sympathies toward him as openly as François Truffaut does with the boy Antoine Doinel in The 400 Blows (1959). (Truffaut was one of the producers of L'Enfance Nue.) The title means, of course, "naked childhood," which is also the title under which it was sometimes released in English-speaking countries, and the nakedness consists of a steady realism, a documentary approach to telling François's story. There are moments of warmth in Pialat's film, such as a wedding party scene, but the general effect of L'Enfance Nue is a clear-eyed directness, as unsparing to the audience as it is to the characters.