Loulou (1980)

Waste of time

Please don't spend money on this.

When a movie has you begging for it to end not even half way through it's pure crap. We've all seen this movie and this characters millions of times, nothing new in it. Don't waste your time.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

I only found this French film because it was featured in the book of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, I recognised the leading actor starring, so I was hoping the critics giving good reviews was right. Basically middle-class Parisian housewife Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) is married to possessive husband André (Guy Marchand), but she is bored of her lifestyle and longs for something else. Then she meets charming street thug Loulou (Gérard Depardieu), he has no job and resorts to robbery to survive, but he provides Nelly some excitement, and she leaves her husband to have a passionate affair with him. For a while it just seems like a casual fling, Nelly is fulfilling lust and Loulou is getting sex and living off her money, but in the mind-set of a middle-class bourgeois, André is doing whatever he can to win back and convince her to return. But then things get complicated when Nelly finds out that she is pregnant with Loulou's child, but he says he will support her, whether he can change his ways and provide for her is a big question. Also starring Humbert Balsan as Michel, Bernard Tronczyk as Rémy, Christian Boucher as Pierrot, Frédérique Cerbonnet as Dominique, Jacqueline Dufranne as Mémère, Willy Safar as Jean-Louis and Agnès Rosier as Cathy. Huppert gives a good performance as the bored housewife who leaves her husband out of boredom and gives in to unadulterated lust, Depardieu is interesting as the unemployed layabout who is charming and likable, together they are an odd couple, but great to watch, there isn't much of story to talk about, it is more a look at social and sexual interaction in contemporary France, with some good backdrops, it is a watchable drama. Gerard Depardieu was number 90 on The 100 Greatest Movie Stars. Very good!

Bored, restless housewife Isabelle Huppert leaves her brutish husband for an overage juvenile delinquent, played by Gerard Depardieu in one of the roles that made him an unlikely international sex symbol. The film is an uninhibited look at the seamier side of romantic Paris, but may be altogether too dark for its own good, and not only in terms of lighting: the script itself is often unforgivably vague. A talented cast gives the largely improvised non-story an almost documentary feel, but with no sympathetic characters (and with a distracting lack of motivation) the film rambles on interminably in no particular direction. In the end it amounts to little more than just another exercise in urban spiritual malaise, complete with stock footage of the cuckold husband blowing a lonely late-night saxophone in his empty apartment, with the TV flickering silently in the background. Not even the most opaque European art-house mood piece can support that kind of cliché.

Pialat is certainly one of the most interesting artists of the last century's final quarter.Interesting by his integrity and coherence and healthy simplicity.There is a great intelligence in these straightforward movies,a taste for directness and for narrative 'elementarity.In this film as well he works on a small canvas.He will not flatter the ordinary people,as he never resorts to the standard optimist anthropology that works with the known conventions.Pialat's characters are full human beings-without idealization.This gives his movies a brutal power and also an unspoken and very concrete …;the violence, brutality, 'instinctuality and 'animality of ordinary people have always found in Pialat an observer of admirable competence.In a disco,a young woman,Nelly,dances with a guy,to the displeasure of André,the man that she came with.He slaps her.She spends her night with her acquaintance,Loulou,and she enjoys his erotic strength.She lives together with the plebes,as it were.The scene of the country party with the low people,Loulou's family,is well made.Nelly participates in a burglary,a plunder.These are the people that she becomes friends with.This is Nine ½ Weeks upside down!There is a need of adventure in Nelly.Like La Femme d'à 'côté,Loulou (1980) is a scene of manners.Maurice Pialat sees the sexuality and the copulation as the core,motor and aim of the common everyday human relations.This is the nucleus, the kernel of the human interactions,the sphere's center.If we look around, we see this is true.There is not any word about love or fulfillment;Maurice Pialat's anthropology is correct and transparent.The mechanisms are simple;they are real.In "Loulou" there is a stream of naturalness ,sincerity and energy that confer the movie its freshness and charm.While the story is dirty, sordid and banal,the movie is,as I just put it,charming in its own way,as a work of art,and amazing.The material of "Loulou" is extremely simple—a young woman that comes from a rich family and is not necessarily thin-skinned passes from a violent man to a rudimentary human being,the bum Loulou and finds a certain happiness with him,for a while.As always with Pialat,there is no trace of idealization.Pialat's objectivity is unmatched.He does not comment the facts shown on screen.At a certain moment in the movie,Loulou and Nelly are lying on a sofa,they laze watching TV. The ex-convict that lives with them sits on the sofa's end,at the couple's feet. Meantime, Loulou's hand is lazily caressing Nelly's tits.Pialat will never try to make physiology pass as poetry.In her youth,Mrs. Huppert had the body of a Nereid ,as light as thistle down, and a luminous and delicate flesh that looks extremely well on screen;Pialat knew to showcase these charms of Mrs. Huppert in "Loulou".It is a fine occasion to see her naked.There are a few erotic scenes that …;Nelly looks truly great naked or in bed with one of her two men,she looked very made-to-be-loved.( Naturalism,yes,and refuse of the current conventions,but Pialat always offers the eroticism without spoiling it.He seems very interested in the sexual ardor and his depictions of the intercourse are never cold,never completely detached,Pialat always manages to find the savor of an erotic scene. Physiology,yes,but Pialat detects something important and striking and spectacular in the sexual act—yes,spectacular,and I think this is the only oasis for the spectacular in his films.It is obvious that, filming intercourse,--Lolou/Nelly,and even André/Nelly,he is never simply documenting a relation—it is more than that.Pialat is one of the remarkable cinematographic poets of the sexuality. And the way he films the naked body—here,Mrs. Huppert's,Mrs. Bonnaire's in another film—well,this is surely an affectionate way of filming naked women—Pialat finds poetry and beauty in this,he is dispassionate till it comes to this …;and,suddenly,a striking beauty—here,Mrs. Huppert's young body--I consider this one of the most beautiful aspects of Pialat's art. For this committed realist,the beauty of the nude,the intensity of sex are real,they appear as real. )In another interesting film,…,Pialat filmed ,with equal gusto,Mrs. Bonnaire.This manifests his taste for the very feminine women.The main three actors—Huppert,Depardieu,Marchand—give truly extraordinary performances. Depardieu is required to look like a chimpanzee;he does.But beyond that he does a very good role.Pialat knew that there is a satisfaction of the mind in merely knowing the truth,in reaching it;in their radicalism his movies make very obvious this satisfaction obtained by the mind in knowing the truth.

I used to think that Isabelle Huppert became interested in sleaze in the late 90s, around the time she made School Of Flesh but now I see that as far back as 1980 she was inserting a toe into murky waters. Watching this film you get the impression that Pialet has seen Tennesee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire and focused on Stanley Kowalski and Stella DuBois at the expense of Blanche and decided to speculate on how Stella, a genteel daughter of a plantation owner, hooked up with Stanley, a Polish lorry driver who has been walking erect only since Tuesday. So, presumably using this speculation as a starting point Pialet takes up his scissors and a piece of thin cardboard and fashions Nelly (Huppert) an educated, middle class bored woman and allows her path to cross that of LouLou (Gerard Depardieu) a guy about one and a half steps up from an ape, lately out of the slammer whose only interests in life are sex and violence. The result is predictable; the moth is attracted to the flame. And that's it. No fresh insights into the Human Condition; no polemics, no point of view, just a trawl through a garbage can for its own sake. As ever Huppert and Depardieu are excellent as is Guy Marchand, whom Huppert leaves for Depardieu but sometimes excellence is not enough.