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"THAT WAS THE worst movie I've ever seen," said the woman sitting next to me as the lights went up after the Sundance screening of Le Garcu, the tenth and latest theatrical feature of French filmmaker Maurice Pialat. The famously combative Pialat probably would have enjoyed her response. Booed as he climbed the stage at Cannes to accept the 1987 Palme d'Or for Under Satan's Sun, Pialat faced the black-tie audience and retorted, "So, you don't like me? Then I can say I don't like you either!"
Hemingwayesque at 71, with his saltand-pepper beard and burly wrestler's body, Pialat hardly conforms to the image of the French filmmaker as a reedy intellectual, and neither are his films wispy formalist studies. Pialat's is a cinema of red meat and Burgundy. Reviewing Le Gar,cu in Positif, Vincent Amiel wrote, "Pialat's cinema is like Depardieu's stomach: it overflows."
That is Gerard Depardieu, of course, who plays the lead in Le Gar,cu, as he has in three other films by Pialat. Despite-or just as obviously, because of-the stormy relationship that began with Loulou in 1979 (when the producers cast Depardieu over Pialat's choice for the role, Jacques Dutronc) and continued through Police ('85) and Under Satan's Sun. Depardieu has become Pialat's projection and alter ego, at least on those occasions (as in A Nos Amours and Under Satan's Sun) when Pialat does not simply put himself on the screen, and he does his best work for him-clean, direct, powerful, with no visible signs of technique.
In Le Garcu, Depardieu plays a character named Gerard, a well-to-do Parisian professional whom we follow over the course of a year or two. Though he dotes on his 3-year-old, Antoine (played by Antoine Pialat, the director's son), he decides to leave the boy's mother, Sophie (Geraldine Pailhas), for a new girlfriend, Cathy (Fabienne Babe), but finds himself continually coming back, just as he continues to see and in some ways depend on his first wife, Micheline (played by Depardieu's wife, Elisabeth).
Sophie falls into a new relationship with one of Gerard's best friends, Jeannot (French soccer star Dominique Rocheteau, easily holding his own with the professional actors), which only drives Gerard to ever more desperate and extreme demonstrations of his claim on Antoine....