Maurice Pialat

Painterly film-maker who defied his many critics

Maurice Pialat, film director and actor: born Cunilhat, France 31 August 1925; married (one son); died Paris 11 January 2003.

Just one year ago, Maurice Pialat declared, "I started too old, and finished too young." His combative nature and fierce independence of spirit are typical of his fellow countrymen in the Puy-de-Dôme, at the heart of the grim grandeur of the Monts du Forez. His early experience as a painter marked the studied composition of almost every frame of his greatest films. He was also a born actor, and appeared in several of his own films.

He embarked on a cinematic career in the late Fifties when he began directing documentaries. The best of this early period can be found in L'Amour existe (1961), Janine (1962) and above all in L'Enfance nue (Naked Childhood) in 1969, played brilliantly by non-professional actors. The success of this film led to a commission to make a television series based on a novel about war refugee children in the First World War, La Maison des Bois (1971), again using untrained children. They live in a remote gamekeeper's house with his wife and teenage son and daughter. The son is called up, and dies in the war.

The film is a disturbing protest against the folly of all wars. It was remarkable for its time, just 10 years after the Algerian conflict, when military censorship still lingered under Pompidou's far from liberal regime. It is significant that it was not allowed to be shown until 1990 on French television. Pialat stated: "You cannot make films about childhood, only films about memory." It was an important start to his career. In the magazine Cinématographe, he confessed: "It forced me to look deep into other people, and it was with delight that I realised I could now do that."

The work on this film released in him a flood of affection for all kinds of common human dilemmas, in masterpieces that were both realistic and honestly entertaining. Nous ne vieillerons pas ensemble (We Won't Grow Old Together, 1972) his next film, with Marlène Jobert and Jean Yanne, was a typical domestic tangle about a man with a mistress who cannot bring himself to divorce. It was to be the theme of his last film, Le Garçu (The Son, 1995). La Gueule ouverte (The Mouth Agape, 1973) is an unusually tender study of a woman stricken by cancer and coming to terms with death. Passe ton bac d'abord (Graduate First, 1979) is in a satirical vein of family conflict.

In Loulou (1980), the sexual permissiveness of the period is sharply evoked. Two young women watch a young man jogging past and remark: "He'd be better off saving his breath . . . for sex with us." The hero is a bit of rough trade (Gérard Depardieu), a drunken lout who is what a classier lady fancies. Isabelle Huppert's refinement is played up mercilessly against Depardieu's oafishness, to brilliant comic effect.

A nos amours (To Our Loves, 1983) brought us Pialat's great discovery, Sandrine Bonnaire, at that time only 15, with Pialat in a supporting role as the father of his unmanageable daughter, who flings herself at all the young men then flies off to California with a rich older man. She has a touching farewell scene with Pialat before leaving. The director urged his actors to improvise, and the effect of such freedom is exciting and refreshing.

The two following works were among Pialat's greatest, Sous le Soleil de Satan (Under Satan's Sun, 1987) and Van Gogh (1991). The former won the Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1987, but it was not well received by the critics. It was based on a famous novel by Georges Bernanos and they were quick to pick a comparison with Robert Bresson's masterpiece, also based on a Bernanos novel, Journal d'un curé de campagne (Diary of a Country Priest, 1950). At the awards ceremony in Cannes, Pialat disrupted the polite atmosphere of self-congratulation that permeates such occasions by shouting, "If you don't like me out there, I don't like you, either!", and raised his right arm in what was almost a bras d'honneur but without the raised middle finger that is the ultimate insult for a Frenchman. The gesture was greeted with wild applause.

Van Gogh was played very well by a popular singer, Jacques Dutronc, who had the Van Gogh physique and managed to suggest some of his charisma. The most memorable moment in the film is not visual, but aural – passionate thudding, like the beat of a deranged heart, of Vincent's frenzied brush on his canvas (seen from behind the easel) that provides more than any studio reproduction could do the startling impression of the artist's tormented images and the sense of his anguished vision – a vision that is also Pialat's, nearing the end of his life and conscious of a desperate weariness overtaking him at the most unexpected moments.

His last film, Le Garçu, again starred Depardieu, with Depardieu's daughter Elisabeth and with Pialat's little boy, Antoine, in the title role. It is another tremulous tale of a couple trying to wrench themselves apart but held together by their little boy. This film, too, was not very well understood by either critics or public. It was the ultimate bitter disappointment for Pialat.

Exactly one year before his death, he said in an interview:

I often dream of a film; a man is dying, it's the end, no pathos, then absolute blackness, that endures. Ninety-five per cent of the people captured on film are dead, yet they are still there if you look at them on a screen. In the same way, I'd like to go on filming after my death. It is an illusion, of course. So, for a good while now, I tell myself I'd rather it all just vanished. The studios, the montage tables, the cinemas, the films – all going up in flames. I like to watch my little son during his 20 minutes in Le Garçu – but even that would have to go up in smoke . . .

An excellent biography of Pialat by Pascal Mérigeau has just been published and is one of the highlights of the winter literary season in France.

James Kirkup