Prickly Pialat gets his due

By all accounts, the late French director Maurice Pialat possessed a difficult, prickly personality. Pialat, considered the bridge between French New Wave directors such as Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut and contemporary French filmmakers, was a terror on the set and didn’t care a sou what people thought of him.

In fact, there’s a famous picture of a defiant Pialat with fist raised high as he was booed on stage at Cannes Film Festival after receiving the Palme d’Or in 1987 for his controversial “Under Satan’s Sun.”

“If you don’t like me, I can’t tell you that I don’t like you either,” he told the unruly crowd.

In one rawly emotional scene in his 1983 film “A Nos Amours,” the high-strung wife (Evelyne Ker) of a manipulative furrier (played by Pialat) lashes out and attacks her estranged husband. Reportedly, her attack was unscripted -- prompted by his boorish behavior toward her during the production.

Despite his personal reputation, though, Pialat was one of the most influential filmmakers of the post-New Wave in France. UCLA Film and Television Archive is casting its spotlight on his career with the first major local retrospective of 10 films he made between 1969 and 1995, including “Under Satan’s Sun,” “Loulou,” his first major international success, and “Police.”

The festival opens Saturday with his 1979 drama “Graduate First” and “A Nos Amours,” the film that made an international star of Sandrine Bonnaire as a love-starved 16-year-old girl -- and won Pialat the Cesar (France’s version of the Oscar).

Like the films of John Cassavetes and Ingmar Bergman, Pialat’s work is raw, rough and unsettling. “His filmmaking is very intimate,” says UCLA programmer David Pendleton, “with the camera often very close to the characters and the actors very exposed and vulnerable.

“There are a lot of stories about how badly he would treat cast and crew,” says Pendleton. “The interesting thing is some of these people did work with him again, some didn’t. A lot of the female actors worked with him once and not again. It seemed to be different with Sandrine Bonnaire. I think he treated her more gently than he did some of the other cast.”

When Gerard Depardieu first worked with Pialat, on 1979’s “Loulou,” the actor found the director so difficult he didn’t speak to him for a year. But time healed their wounds and they became best friends. They collaborated in “Under Satan’s Sun,” 1985’s “Police” and Pialat’s last film, 1995’s “Le Garcu.”

Pendleton believes there was a method behind Pialat’s brutality as he worked. “I think he did a lot of what he did on the set to try and get what he wanted from the cast and crew, which are these moments of sort of naked emotion, vulnerability or aggression -- conflict between men and women, parents and children, siblings and class conflict.”

Though his films are difficult to watch, “I think that what he is trying to reveal is something about the human condition that is not necessarily a defeatist vision or even a pessimistic vision,” offers Pendleton. “There is this emphasis on conflict. There is a lot of violence in his films, but they are not necessarily meant to be nihilistic.”

Pialat, who died in 2003 at 77, was as demanding of himself as he was of his cast and crew.

“He would often give interviews a year or two after a film had come out, saying the film was no good,” says Pendleton. “He would often complain that he didn’t have the means other filmmakers had, though those complaints sort of subsided by the end of his career. Even when he got better known, he was not always very well loved within French filmmaking circles.”

His peers often gave him the cold shoulder because he would be critical and unflattering of the directors, especially the New Wave filmmakers. “He commented [later] that he was jealous,” says Pendleton. Pialat made his first short film, “Love Exists,” in 1960. “It was extremely well received, but then he couldn’t get any funding to make a feature film until 1969.

“So during the whole crucial part of the New Wave, he felt he was ready to make films and be part of the movement but he wasn’t able to. I think that accounts for part of his attitude,” Pendleton says. “He harbored a certain amount of resentment for how long it took him to get his filmmaking career started. I think that is something that scarred him in a way.”

*

Maurice Pialat

Where: James Bridges Theater, Melnitz Hall, UCLA

When: Saturday to Feb. 6

Price: $7 for general admission; $5 for students, seniors and members of UCLA Alumni Assn.

Contact: (310) 206-FILM or go to www.cinema.ucla.edu

Schedule

Saturday: “A Nos Amours,” “Graduate First,” 7:30 p.m.

Jan. 30: “We Won’t Grow Old Together,” “Loulou,” 7 p.m.

Feb. 2: “Naked Childhood,” “The Mouth Agape,” 7:30 p.m.

Feb. 5: “Under Satan’s Sun,” “Police,” 7:30 p.m.

Feb. 6: “Van Gogh; at 7 p.m.: “Le Garcu,” 2 p.m.