LOULOU Movie Review

In the 1950s, Louis Malle's The Lovers struck a cultural nerve with its portrait of a bourgeois woman (Jeanne Moreau) who—refusing to deny her repressed sexuality any longer—bolts her suffocating marriage for the passion of a younger lover. In the 1980s, it was Nelly (Isabelle Huppert), wife of a middle-class, modestly successful executive, whose chance disco encounter with the leather-clad, brutish sexual athlete Loulou (Gérard Depardieu) diverts her well-planned life off onto a high-speed but dangerously unpaved road. Nelly's guilt-free honesty is apparent when her jilted husband demands to know what Loulou's got that he hasn't got. “He never stops,” she replies. Neither does the film, which is a headlong dive into a pool of unbridled passion, directed with wit, intelligence, and matter-of-fact directness by the gifted Maurice Pialat. Depardieu was born to play this role; his performance feels lived-in and completely fleshed out. Likewise, Huppert as a performer seems liberated by Nelly's lack of pretense, and her cool, controlled exterior creates an extraordinarily sensual chemistry with her big, impatient, explosively narcissistic co-star. One of the most underrated French films of the 1980s.

NEXT STOP … Police, A Nos Amours, Breathless

1980 (R) 110m/C FR Isabelle Huppert, Gerard Depardieu, Guy Marchand; D: Maurice Pialat. VHS NYF