Seven Close Encounters 2016 / La gueule ouverte / France 1974
Olmo Omerzu presents
Birth, childhood and youth, adulthood, falling in love, old age, death: few elect to depict the last of the various stages that constitute our lives. And virtually no-one has succeeded in capturing those final moments in a film – what they mean for the person who is dying and also for those gathered round the deathbed. Pialat’s work, hovering between a raw portrayal and a quasi-metaphysical contemplation, is simply a masterpiece.
“Maurice Pialat is a filmmaker who made me start to take an interest in film realism. In his work it’s such a different kind of realism and it’s often so physical that it becomes abstract, metaphysical. At least that’s how I’d describe The Mouth Agape, in which, via the simple premise of a family gathering, Pialat demonstrates that death and sexuality are inseparably linked.” – Olmo Omerzu. Viewers really do get a strange feeling when they see the film’s precisely scanned details of real life, and the way the plot unfolds seems authentic as well; nothing is artificially dramatised, no static or insubstantial moments have been excluded. And yet, we get a clear sense that the significance of the piece hangs somewhere high above these almost pedantically recorded minutiae. The earthy expression gueule in the film’s title isn’t meant as a vulgarity, as it might seem at first, and, by the time the closing credits roll, the word has acquired a quite different meaning.
Zdena Škapová
82 min / Color, 35 mm
Director Maurice Pialat
/ Screenplay Maurice Pialat
/ Dir. of Photography Néstor Almendros
/ Editor Bernard Dubois, Arlette Langmann
/ Art Director Michel de Broin
/ Producer André Génovès, Micheline Pialat
/ Coproduction Lido Films, Les Films de la Boétie
/ Cast Nathalie Baye, Hubert Deschamps, Philippe Léotard, Monique Mélinand
/ Sales Gaumont
Maurice Pialat (b. 1925, Cunlhat – 2003, Paris), director, screenwriter and actor who, after studying painting and architecture, began to make documentaries in the late 1950s and early 1960s, during the blustery arrival of the French New Wave. In his late feature debut Naked Childhood (1968) he already demonstrated directorial approaches that would become characteristic for his work. His films were reminiscent of the style of Robert Bresson from the previous generation, with whom he shared a strong interest in painting. Pialat’s films are known for their austerity of expression, pithy detail, static lensing, conspicuously long shots, and his disassociation from his characters and their dramatic stories. Selected filmography: We Won’t Grow Old Together (Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble, 1972), Loulou (1980), To Our Loves (1983), Police (1985), Under the Sun of Satan (1987), Van Gogh (1991).
Gaumont
30 avenue Charles de Gaulle, 92 200, Neuilly sur Seine
France
Phone: +33 146 432 060
E-mail: [email protected]
First-hand brews throughout the year.
Be among the first to learn about upcoming events and other news. We only send the newsletter when we have something to say.
