Sortie de DVD : L'Enfance Nue / Police, Maurice Pialat
L'Enfance Nue
Marking his feature debut, director Maurice Pialat's film chronicles the trials and tribulations of the young Francois, a rural orphan whose unpredictable nature leads him from his foster home into the arms of a benevolent elderly couple.
One of the earth-shaking feature debuts in the history of cinema, Maurice Pialat's L'Enfance-nue [Naked-Childhood] provides a perspective on growing-up that rejects both sentimentality and modish cynicism. Its unflinching, but also warmly accommodating, outlook on childhood attracted François Truffaut to take on the role as co-producer of Pialat's film which, ironically, exists as much as a response to Truffaut's own debut The 400 Blows as that film was to the 'cinema of childhood' that came before the New Wave. First-time actor Michel Tarrazon plays the young François, a provincial orphan whose destructive behaviour precipitates his relocation from the home of a long-term foster family to the care of a benevolent elderly couple. In the course of this transition, Pialat's film presents the turbulence of François's unmoored existence, and his explosive reactions to the contradictory emotions it engenders. This is the naked portrait of a soul's and an entire society's dysfunction, before the moment of reconciliation
Police
A tough cop is trying to break a Tunisian drug smuggling ring but is sidetracked in his investigations when he falls in love with the drug-carrier's girlfriend. As might be expected in a film co-scripted by Catherine Breillat, Pialat shows less interest in the thriller aspect of the police genre than in the intense relationship between Depardieu’s tough cop and Marceau’s beautiful and manipulative thief. Pialat casts a hard eye on police procedure, and an even harder one on the amour fou at the film’s centre.
