Loulou (no 46)

by Allan Fish

(France 1980 110m) DVD1/2

A bit of Gallic fluff

p  Tyves Peyrot  d  Maurice Pialat  w  Arlette Langmann  ph  Pierre-William Glenn, Jacques Loiseleux  ed  Sophie Coussein, Yann Dedet  m  Philippe Sarde  art  Alain Alitbol, Jean-Pierre Sarrazin, Max Berto,

Isabelle Huppert (Nelly), Gérard Depardieu (Loulou), Guy Marchand (André), Humbert Baslan (Michel), Bernard Tronczak (Rémy), Agnès Rosier (Cathy),  

Much misunderstood at the time, Maurice Pialat’s film never attempts to be remotely conventional, either in its central characters or its plot structure, deliberately ending on an ambiguous note that many will find unsatisfactory, and emphasising the seedier aspects of turn of the eighties Parisian life.  His film lifts up a stone to stare at the underbelly of Parisian culture and finds a festering cancer underneath.  Worse still, it finds a blasé, almost nihilistic attitude about it staring back at him.

            Nelly is a middle-class bourgeoise wife who works in advertising in the same company as her rather staid husband, André.  One evening, out dancing in a club, Nelly deliberately provokes André by dancing up to a loutish thug, nicknamed Loulou, and André loses it by slapping her.  Laughing at him as if to view him as impotent and not worthy of respect, she goes off with Loulou and spends a night of energetic sexual activity with him.  Returning home the following morning, her husband at first seems calm, but eventually throws her out on the spot and she and Loulou set up together.  André believes she will come to her senses, but Nelly prefers her loafer lover as, though she has to pay for both of them, he’s better in bed, and this is all that maters to her at this moment in time.

            The very notion of masculine virility is at the heart of Nelly’s attitudinal stance, observing that she’d rather have “a loafer that fucks to a rich man who bugs me.”  Loulou fucks, and does it often and well enough to make everything else immaterial.  Her husband berates that she can’t discuss literature or cultured things with him, and cannot understand what she sees in him.  This very contradiction is summed up perfectly in the sequence where Nelly gets prepared for bed on the floor.  She wants to read, but she also wants to be ready for love if Loulou is, as expected, up for it.  She keeps her top on and prepares to dive under the covers to put on her glasses and begin to read, but she makes a point of removing her knickers.  She needs Loulou because he is so good in bed, but she cannot totally disassociate herself with her previous life, and a brief return to work with her husband is a disaster, while his repression becomes almost masochistic, not only in turning to playing the saxophone to symbolise his depression, but wandering around after her in a very humiliating fashion. 

            Pialat and Langmann make a point of not explaining every action, and allow the viewer to make their own mind up about the characters.  Nelly is selfish and hard to like, but her sexual appetite, immodesty and very European candour towards sex mark her out as one of the most memorable female characters in eighties French film.  It also marked a serious reversal for Huppert from her usual sort of roles – compare it to her roles in La Dentellière and Violette Nozière, for example; both icy, controlled and passive.  She was always a very unconventional object of desire, with her freckles, natural red hair and – here – very unglamorous underarm hair, but she radiates an undoubted erotic intensity.  For his part, though embodying a type of role he’d mastered for Bertrand Blier several years earlier, Depardieu is surprisingly sensitive as the lout.  One can really feel the pain in his eyes when Nelly announces that she’s aborted their pregnancy, and all this in a character it’s impossible to like.  It was famous at the time for the bed-breaking scene and the outtake which the stars then adlibbed, where Huppert falls between two parked cars, but it has more than that.  Forget the fact that it ends abruptly, for the characters were the observance here, and it was an observance borne out of instinct.  An instinct that makes it, as Andrew Sarris observed, “a masterpiece of subtlety and eroticism.”