Taglines: A Masterpiece Of subtlety And eroticism.
Loulou movie storyline. Maurice Pialat’s portrait of contemporary France mocks prosperity as a substitute for social and sexual revolution. Nelly abandons her bourgeois friends and a steady relationship for the unemployed layabout Loulou, whose charms include focusing his energy into sex.
Loulou is a 1980 French drama film directed by Maurice Pialat, starring Isabelle Huppert and Gérard Depardieu. For Loulou, Pialat was nominated for the Golden Palm award at the 1980 Cannes Film Festival.
About the Story
In a disco with her husband André, a cultured man who owns a small advertising agency in which she works, Nelly meets Loulou, who is just out of jail and drunk. She spends the night with him in a hotel. Next day André orders her out of his spacious apartment, so she moves into a hotel room with Loulou, who she supports as he does not believe in work.
When she becomes pregnant, she rents a small apartment for them which Loulou fills with his criminal friends, who one night take her on a burglary. Her well-off brother tries to get her to see sense, but she just wants Loulou and their child. When Loulou and his gang take her to Sunday lunch with his mother, there is a frightening confrontation with his psychotic brother-in-law who starts firing a shotgun. Realising at last the impossibility of having the child, Nelly has an abortion. Loulou is hurt, but the film ends as it began with the two staggering home drunk.
Film Review: Loulou
Well-made but basically dreary low-life melodrama which, according to the accompanying interview with lead Isabelle Huppert, writer/director Pialat infused with a good deal of autobiographical detail; given the mainly unsympathetic characters involved, it doesn’t do him any compliments – and he does seem to have been a troubled man, as Huppert also says that Pialat often disappeared for days on end during the shoot!
The acting is uniformly excellent, however; despite their relatively young age, Huppert and co-star Gerard Depardieu (as the title character!) were already at the forefront of modern French stars – a status which, with varying degrees of success, they both still hold to this day.
I have 3 more of Pialat’s films in my “VHS To Watch” pile, albeit all in French without English Subtitles; due to this fact but also LOULOU’S oppressive realism – in spite of its undeniable artistic merit – I can’t say that I’m in any particular hurry to check them out now…
Loulou (1980)
Directed by: Maurice Pialat
Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu, Guy Marchand, Humbert Balsan, Bernard Tronczak, Christian Boucher, Jacqueline Dufranne
Screenplay by: Arlette Langmann
Production Design by: Alain Alitbol, Max Berto, Jean-Pierre Sarrazin
Cinematography by: Pierre-William Glenn, Jacques Loiseleux
Film Editing by: Yann Dedet
Costume Design by: Dorothée Nonn
Distributed by: New Yorker Films
Release Date: September 3, 1980
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