#534: PIALAT, Maurice: L'Enfance Nue (1968)

PIALAT, Maurice (France)

L'Enfance Nue [1968]

Spine #534
DVD

The singular French director Maurice Pialat puts his distinctive stamp on the lost-youth film with this devastating portrait of a damaged foster child. We watch as ten-year-old François (Michel Terrazon) is shuttled from one home to another, his behavior growing increasingly erratic, his bonds with his surrogate parents perennially fraught. In this, his feature debut, Pialat treat that potentially sentimental scenario with astonishing sobriety and stark realism. With its full-throttle mixture of emotionality and clear-eyed skepticism, L'enfance nue (Naked Childhood) was advance notice of one of the most masterful careers in French cinema, and remains one of Pialat's finest works.

83 minutes
Color

Monaural

in French

1:66:1 aspect ratio

Criterion Release 2010

Director/Writers

Screenplay by Arlette Langmann and Maurice Pialat.

Pialat was 43 when he directed L'enfance Nue.

Other Pialat films in the Collection:

#337: À Nos Amours (1983)

The Film

Hailed by critics but received indifferently by the public, Pialat’s debut feature film is an uncomfortable watch. The director vowed to try to please his audiences in the future; but nearly all his films are similarly “uncomfortable.”

So be it. Do you really want a huge wad of cotton candy each time you see edgy cinema? Pialat wants the viewer to puzzle it all out, happy ending be damned.

**

Michel Terrazon is François Founier, a ten-year-old child who was apparently abandoned by his biological parents. (The young Terrazon came from a stable family, and acted beautifully under Pialat’s tutelage.)

After a frustrating stay with the young Joigny couple (Linda Gutemberg, Raoul Billerey) (we infer that she cannot have children), he is relocated to live with an elderly couple, Mr. and Mrs. Thierry (real-life spouses Marie-Louise and René Thierry), and Mrs. Thierry’s mother — Nana (Marie Marc).

The Thierry’s — non-professionals, who IRL had fostered six or seven kids, more or less successfully — prove to be a better setting for the rambunctious kid. For one thing, there is an older “brother” in the house, Raoul (Henri Puff), who is somewhat of a good influence.

Still, the kid keeps getting into trouble. Serious trouble …

Pialat shows us that no matter how patient and tender the Thierry’s are with François, the internal bruises from parental abandonment, and the constant shuffling back and forth between foster homes and Social Services, do not heal so easily.

A remarkable film about a difficult subject.

Film Rating (0-60):

55

The Extras

The Booklet

Sixteen-page booklet featuring an essay by critic Phillip Lopate.

“In his defiantly maverick directing career, which yielded only ten features in thirty-five years, Pialat (1925-2003) was a stimulant and irritant, agitating the cozy pool of French cinema. His first effort, the lyrically bitter short essay film L’amour existe (1960) [see below], about the suburbs, won a prize at the Venice Film Festival and the admiration of François Truffaut, who offered to help produce his first feature. No doubt Truffaut was also attracted by the subject matter of Pialat’s proposed project: a boy abandoned by his mother who is shunted from one foster home to another. But the result was no knockoff of The 400 Blows (1959) {Spine #5}; if anything, it reversed the experience of that beloved predecessor, in that Pialat made difficult any sentimental identification with the boy, made it equally hard to indict or applaud the adults, and forced the audience to revise its judgment with each scene.”

Commentary

None.

L’amour existe

Director Pialat’s poetic 1960 short film about life on the outskirts of Paris.

The banlieues.

“The gifted child grows into a sullen teenager, trapped forever. He was wrong to stay imprisoned here where he was born — a few too many miles from the hub of things. Year upon year in rented rooms and furnished studios, with ten people crammed into a room. Blows given, blows received. A deaf ear turned to the cries.”

Sixty+ years later, it’s only gotten worse.

Autour de “L’enfance nue”

A fifty-minute documentary shot just after the film’s release.

Including candid interviews with the Thierry’s and the boy (now older) who François was based on (filmed in shadow for anonymity).

The final part of the documentary is a roundtable discussion featuring a support group of adults who were in foster care in their youth.

Look carefully — you’ll see the pain in their souls …

Excerpts

From a 1973 French television interview with Pialat.

The director is interviewed after L’Enfance Nue is shown on TV. He is extremely self-deprecating about why the film flopped, occasionally turns defensive, but generally gets the idea across that he was never put on this earth to make commercial product. Hurrah.

Visual essay

By critic Kent Jones on the film and Pialat’s cinematic style.

“You could say that Pialat’s violent breaks — his breakaway; far away — from smooth dramatic progression and the compartmentalized thinking that often goes with it; his frequent breaks into continuity, and his effort to expunge self-consciousness or grandiosity from all performances, open the way for the militant tenderness that made him one of the great filmmakers of his era.”

Video interview

With Pialat collaborators Langmann and Patrick Grandperret.

How the film came to be (Langmann admits there was barely a script, and the Thierry’s, especially, more or less improvised their scenes, drawing on their real life experiences) …

Langmann also discusses the difficulties in the editing process.

Extras Rating (0-40):

35

55 + 35 =

90

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