|
"Le soleil ni la mort ne se peuvent regarder fixement," Maurice Pialat accepts the challenge. Numbers and grids are overlaid on skin as the patient (Monique Mélinand) undergoes X-ray tests, her son (Philippe Léotard) waits outside in an Edward Hopper corridor. Cosi fan tutte is merely something to fill the air when the terminal decline won't be discussed, awkward pleasantries at the hospital are drowned out by quarreling from another bed, "I'd rather die at home." Home is Auvergne, where Dad (Hubert Deschamps) tends to a customer at the textile shop by feeling her up for measurements. "Some family you've got," snaps the son's wife (Nathalie Baye). (Beset by a philandering streak of his own, Léotard brings a ripe blonde to a hotel room for a fling abruptly curtailed, she walks over to a bidet for an offhand Degas nude.) Horror of the loved one who suddenly "looks 100 years old," mortality and carnality in remarkable play, caught by Pialat in long takes of the most harrowing clarity. Slowly expiring beneath looming floral wallpaper, the materfamilias castigates her husband in halting bursts before her voice gives out. "Cark, not grace," pace Beckett, a close-up of a crucifix on rumpled sheets might be a Morandi natura morta or a blank joke on the beauty and spirituality said to wait at the end of life. La vieillesse nue, wheezing to the end. "C'est fini." Bergman's Cries and Whispers for the ordeal, Ozu's Tokyo Story for the aftermath. The nailed casket, the winding funeral, the Néstor Almendros lyricism shaved down to astringent light. Something of a goatish provincial bigot over the course of the story, the husband weeps like a lost boy as the weight of loss hits him. "I've got good memories." A speeding reverse track for youth's nugatory recoil, lights out for old age's dolorous acceptance. With Henri Saulquin, Alain Grestau, Anna Gayane, Mireille Laurenchet, Corinne Derel, and Marie-Blanche Dehaux.
--- Fernando F. Croce |