THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS (La Maison des Bois) – made for TV A
7 Episodes, 53 min, 47 min, 40 min, 53 min, 53 min, 56 min,
58 min
France (360 mi) 1971
d: Maurice Pialat
If I had to choose the
one film that best allows the viewer to penetrate into Maurice Pialat's
universe, I would unhesitatingly choose THE HOUSE IN THE WOODS. This series
happily combines a profound naturalism and a strange sense of fantasy, a
liberty in its tone where hidden or manifested suffering alternates with an
astonishing happiness to be alive.
—Joel Magny from Cahiers
du Cinéma, May/June 2004
While much admired by Jean-Luc Godard and Francois Truffaut,
Pialat was considered a problematic director, difficult to work with on a set,
claiming as many detractors as fans. “I
don’t like you either,” he allegedly snarled at a Cannes Film Festival audience
in 1987 when his film UNDER SATAN’S SUN was an unpopular winner. After a failed career as a painter, Pialat
dabbled in theater and documentary filmmaking, making his first notable short,
L’AMOUR EXISTE, in 1960 at the age of 35.
He was 43 when he made his first feature, after the fervor of the New
Wave had waned. He appeared as a
hard-nosed teacher in Jean Eustache’s 1974 film MES PETITES AMOUREUSES, a
director who shared his pessimistic, dire, and bleak worldview. He used long takes and handheld cameras to
sharply reproduce the psychological tensions between characters, producing
films that are unsentimental, defiant, deeply personal and sexually bold. His honest and raw portraits of family life,
sexual warfare, and emotional abandonment have had a tremendous influence on
contemporary French cinema.
A volatile realist who’s often compared to John Cassavetes,
though their works have very different tones and effects, both share a tendency
to observe extreme behavior with an objective, realistic eye. According to Film Comment editor-at-large Kent Jones: “Where the breaks in a
Cassavetes film are strictly behavior-oriented, getting at the essential
unpredictability of people...Pialat’s often feel like the exquisite agony of
the moment, which must always come to an end, the transience of experience,
eternally invigorating and just as frustrating—few filmmakers have ever come as
close to capturing it on film…Of his 11 features, three — WE WON'T GROW OLD
TOGETHER (1972), À NOS AMOURS (1983), and VAN GOGH (1991) — are among the
finest films made in France or any other country in the last half century, and
the rest aren't far behind.”
To which I would add this film, as easily my favorite Pialat
film is this expansive six-hour film made for French television, 7 episodes of
52 minutes each, where the length of the film allows the director to
meticulously detail the rhythms of small-town life in the countryside during
WWI, from 1914 to 1918, completely absent any sentimentality, building interest
and emotion through time and through the presentation of the smallest details,
by observing ordinary family life, much like Olmi’s THE TREE OF WOODEN CLOGS
(1978), but less spiritual and more realistic, utilizing a series of vignettes
to paint a large, impressionistic portrait of a community, ultimately revealing
a remarkable view of humanity. The film,
written by René Wheeler, then re-written by Pialat and Arlette Langmann, who
also co-edits the film, follows young, rambunctious all-male schoolchildren and
the close scrutiny provided by their teacher, played by the director himself,
the Catholic priest and the goings-on behind the scenes with the altar boys
stealing a bit of the Father’s wine, a rotund gamekeeper (Pierre Doris) and his
nurturing wife (Jacqueline Dufranne), along with their sensitive teenage son
(Henri Puff) and strikingly beautiful daughter (Agathe Natanson), who take in
two young Parisian boys left abandoned during the war, their fathers called up
to the front, whose mothers write regularly and come to visit bearing gifts
every Sunday, as well as another troubled child, Hervé (Hervé Levy), who was
dropped on their doorstep, who hates the visiting mothers, as he has no family
contact or visits of his own, yet his warmth and spontaneity infectiously draws
us and others to him, the leading character in the film, as most of the action
is seen through his eyes.
Using plenty of character development and charming
personality, always utilizing humor by revealing the idiosyncrasies of everyone
involved, especially among the playful and mischievous boys, whose authentic
realism is simply phenomenal in this film, who curiously want to see the
arrival of ambulances bringing wounded soldiers, or the aristocratic Marquis
(Fernand Gravey) who lives on a gigantic estate continuing to live a life of
refinement as if there is no war on, whose wife is killed early on in a
suspicious roadside fatality, or a grumpy socialist barkeeper who is filled
with cynical suspicions of the Marquis, or the frail postman on his bike who
regularly delivers letters to the family while muttering nonsense to himself,
or the visiting Parisian mothers, who may as well be tottering fools, so out of
place are they in the country wearing their flamboyant, feathered hats, or a
local airman and his girlfriend who befriend Hervé and even allow him up in the
air to fly, not to mention pastoral picnics in the countryside filled with
languid moments where time, and the war, seem to drift away entirely.
All of this layered backdrop sets up who lives in the town
so that we grow to know and care about its inhabitants. This is especially significant by the fourth
episode, which brings the war and its ramifications to the door of this sleepy
country town, opening with a long line of soldiers walking slowly through the
countryside, where the kids run and greet them and ask for photographs and
other mementos before the young men from the town are enlisted themselves,
including the gamekeeper’s son. This is
an exquisitely filmed episode, including an aerial sequence between a German
and a French plane, balancing the loneliness and the quiet of the soldiers
against the mothers and families hugging and kissing their young sons
goodbye. Of course, many never
return. The cost of war is shown in
painfully intimate detail, not by any graphic war imagery or disfigurement, but
in the mayor’s arrival at the gamekeeper’s doorstep to report the death of
their son, which sets off an agonizing chain reaction which is stunning in its
emotional range from screams to silence, where we can feel the weight of the
world hanging on their shoulders. When
the Armistice is signed, the town weeps in a joyous celebration of flag-waving
and relief as the soldiers return home.
There’s an interesting juxtaposition of the town’s quiet memorial
tribute with the teacher reminding the schoolchildren of the human price paid
for freedom.
When the war is over, the children are rounded up by their
families and returned to Paris, even Hervé’s father arrives with his
step-mother and step-sister, leaving the gamekeeper’s residence suddenly empty
and alone. In Paris, Hervé’s new parents
throw a welcome home party, where one women sings several soprano arias to the
slightly off-tune piano, but eventually, the unspoken grief from the loss of
their original spouses becomes painfully evident, and they fight and argue with
each other. So after hearing that the
gamekeeper’s wife is seriously ill, Hervé runs away back to the
countryside. His quiet return to their
home, and in particular, the unspoken emotions created by reducing the images
strictly to the essentials has a profound effect, literally inducing a
transforming religious experience without anyone ever mentioning the name of
God, something out of the transcendent poetry of Bresson (Introduction
to Bresson). But as his family
arrives to bring him back to the city, we are left with the ravishing beauty of
the country home, with its life force abruptly removed once again. The use of music, the dark voice of the
soprano in Ravel’s “Trois Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis” 3 Beaux Oiseaux du Paradis ,
Ravel - YouTube (3:21) is also extremely well chosen, usually opening and
closing each episode in a wordless still image of haunting beauty.
