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This chapter presents a profile of the French film director Maurice Pialat. Pialat's work inspires comparison with legendary figures such as Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, yet he does not have the international reputation one might expect, given his gifts as a director and his importance in French cinema history. Pialat's death in 2003 inevitably situated him as a filmmaker of the 1980s, the decade in which his work began to receive serious critical attention and attracted a broader public. Yet by 1983, when A nos amours won the prestigious Prix Louis Delluc and the César for best film, he had been making films for over twenty years. Perhaps one of the most telling moments in Maurice Pialat's ongoing relationship with film and the French film-going public was the scandal at Cannes over the attribution of the Palme d'or in 1987. If the name Pialat is not without significance to the French filmgoing public, it is partly because he acquired the reputation of a singularly difficult and demanding director, who provoked and psychologically abused his actors and collaborators.

This chapter explores the films Loulou, A nos amours and Police. The common theme of these three films is that they are all in some respects family portraits. The scenario for Loulou, written by Arlette Langmann, was based on the break-up of the writer's relationship with Pialat over her affair with Dédé. A nos amours was only one of a number of films in the 1980s that was based on a father–daughter storyline, often with incestuous overtones. The attention paid to the father–daughter narrative also reflects the fact that within French society genetic engineering and changes in inheritance laws put the position of the father within the family in crisis. The impetus for the film that became Police was provided by a dinner to which Toscan du Plantier invited Pialat and Gérard Depardieu, hoping to re-establish cordial relations between them. The film Police is centred around the story of three brothers, in which he tries to convey the subtleties of the brothers' relationship.

This chapter explores Maurice Pialat's work on the theme of family. In the broadest sense, all of Pialat's films are about family, whether this involves the interactions of parents and children or the couple whose problematic relationship will preclude their becoming a family and having a child or the solitary figure who will never find a place in a family, even the larger family of a community of faith and whose isolation will be a source of much suffering. A whole constellation of issues emerges from Pialat's preoccupation with the family: issues of community and national identity, generational conflict and its historical counterpart: tradition versus change, work and money, sexuality and sexual politics, and paternity.

This chapter discusses family portraits in the films Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, La Gueule ouverte and Passe ton bac d'abord. The film Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble emphasises the theme of abandonment and suggests that the wife's role is crucial to the drama. The film gains in intensity by concentrating on the affair and the gradual erosion of feeling that ultimately ends it. The title of the film La Gueule ouverte, which might be roughly translated as mouth agape, reflects Pialat's willingness to shock, and the chapter talks about the scene that was to have justified it. Pialat even went so far as to attempt to shoot a scene in his family mausoleum, scandalising some of the crew by having his mother's casket opened. In the film Passe ton bac d'abord viewers get only brief fragmentary glimpses of the group's family life.

This chapter discusses the different genres of Maurice Pialat's films. Nothing could have seemed more astonishing than Pialat's decision to follow Police with an adaptation of Georges Bernanos's 1926 novel Sous le soleil de Satan. A novel of the supernatural incarnate—complete with a false miracle—written by a fervent Catholic, it had impressed contemporary critics with its evocation of the mysterious reality of evil and of Satan. Pialat whose realism seemingly excluded supernatural or fantastic subjects appeared to have mistaken himself for Robert Bresson. Pialat's choice of Depardieu—as he appears in the role: heavy, plodding, out of breath, seemingly dazed and frequently unsteady on his feet—is emblematic of the difficulties faced by a realist filmmaker attempting to portray the invisible and ineffable mysteries of faith and of spiritual vocation solely through material means. If Pialat attempts once to use the tool of the voice-over to convey the priest's innermost thoughts, he then abandons it as an option. There is no other articulation of the priest's convictions, motivations, physical or spiritual anguish other than his gestures, exchanges with others and the brief moments in which he talks to himself.

This chapter focuses on Maurice Pialat's relationship to the Nouvelle Vague and to two major filmmakers of the 1930s and 1940s against whose work Pialat measured his own: Jean Renoir and Marcel Carné. Pialat's outburst reflects his longstanding resentment over the fact that the young directors of the Nouvelle Vague had already begun to make names for themselves in the 1960s while he was still struggling to make films. His sense that he had not been given the same opportunities as the little group of friends at Cahiers led him to reject the Nouvelle Vague and belittle its importance. He turned elsewhere to find a model for a successful career in film, looking back to the popular cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, to films by major directors such as Pagnol, Carné or Renoir and the Saturday night cinema he had loved as a child. Yet the small-budget revolution associated with the Nouvelle Vague made it increasingly difficult for any filmmaker to aspire to a career in the mould of Pagnol or Carné.

This chapter discusses paternity as the theme in the film Le Garçu, which was the last film of Maurice Pialat. Le Garçu is not an inappropriate conclusion to Pialat's lifework in film. It brings his career full circle, reconnecting with the autobiographical and documentary inspiration of his first films and focusing more directly on what had always been the central concern of his cinema: the family. Le Garçu represents an important shift in the paradigm of becoming a father, as the character Gérard is both a son and a father. This film can be said to be Pialat's cinematic universe. The various iterations of the father–son relationship unify the composition, becoming the thematic equivalent of a pictorial motif. The story of le garçu and his own father then becomes crucial to Pialat's portrayal of paternity.

This chapter presents different depictions of love from filmmakers of different traditions. The two greatest filmmakers of love are Josef von Sternberg and Eric Rohmer, the latter of whom analyses the amorous ego as a psychological and social fact that can be observed from the outside. Michelangelo Antonioni's films exhibit ambivalence between sympathy and critical distance. At the center of Maurice Pialat's films is always a series of complex interactions and relationships that release composed feelings of aggression and tenderness in the characters involved in these relationships. The cinema of Wong Kar-Wai seeks to include society, sex, emotion, historical conditions, and personal character traits within the phenomenon of love. Examples of films that depict love negatively against the background of social obstacles include Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation, Pablo Trapero's El Buonarense, and Paolo Sorrentino's Le Consequenze dell'amore.