Film Forum

France, 1980
Directed by Maurice Pialat
Starring Isabelle Huppert, Gérard Depardieu, Guy Marchand
Approx. 101 min. DCP.

“LOULOU is a challenging, absorbing example of the awkward beauty of the late Maurice Pialat. Superficially, it’s a keenly observed, naturalist, semi-improvised, hand-shot ‘slice-of-life’, set in the post-Women’s Lib Paris of the late 1970s, depicting class- and culture-clashing passion. A young accountant (a still-flushed-cheeked Isabelle Huppert, in one of her most sensual and mysteriously protean performances) leaves her incredulous, angered bourgeois husband for the bed of an earthy, unemployed petty ex-con (a superbly uningratiating  and still equine and cocksure Gérard Depardieu). As such, it seems a little dated, but on a deeper level, it’s fully part of the influential Pialat’s audacious, experimental attempt to intersect the too-often parallel lines of inquiry of  realist and ‘spiritual’ cinema – imagine an unholy marriage of, say, Cassavetes and Bresson.” – Time Out

Reviews

“SUBTLE AND UNABASHEDLY EROTIC… What counts most in this sizzling yet wry love story between a pretty bourgeois and ex-con stud is her reactions to what is happening and what her fate reveals of the world in which we all live…. A classically French tale of the grand passion set in the mean side streets of Paris.”  
— Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times