Although Loulou is a film about the gradual disintegration of a marriage, it is important to note that nobody has been vilified for it. One might be surprised to learn how two men who have differences over their affections for a woman end up becoming good friends. One doesn't know how well staunch feminists have viewed "Loulou" but it can be said that it presents a very strong willed woman who is aware of her priorities in life. It is for her portrayal as strong willed Nelly that veteran French actress Isabelle Huppert was nominated for César award in the best actress category in 1981.Actor Guy Marchand was also nominated for best supporting actor César for his role as Nelly's husband André. French director Maurice Pialat had absolute control over creating strong characters for his films. This is the reason why his protagonists are believed to have the ability to bear any adversity with stoic calm. This sentiment is nicely echoed in one of his important films Loulou. It is considered to be a masterpiece in Pialat's little but highly productive filmography.

What is the attraction for a bourgeois woman that makes her leave her world in exchange of an uncertain future? Boredom, plain and simple, or so it seems what makes Nelly, a woman who has a good life with Andre, her husband, an advertising executive, throw all away when she meets Loulou. He is a petty criminal living a marginal life, but who brings a new excitement to the life of this Parisian woman.One has seen this theme exploited before. Yet, director Maurice Pialat spun a different angle in a relationship between two people from opposite sides of society. The film is more about style than substance, as one is taken to the world of Loulou, a man that has not amounted to much, yet, he has a magnetic effect on Nelly. It is basically a story in which Nelly awakens to sensual situations she never felt with Andre. The film gives the viewer a glimpse of that particular period in Paris. It has a feeling of having been largely improvised, or that was probably the idea behind the screenplay by Mr. Pialat and Arlette Langmann, which takes the viewer into that milieu.The main reason for watching the film are the two stars: Gerard Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert, two of the brightest stars at an excellent point in their film careers. There is magnetism in their scenes as well as sexual explicitness. Guy Marchand appears as Andre, the husband who must accept his wife's decision in abandoning their marriage.

Well-made but basically dreary low-life melodrama which, according to the accompanying interview with lead Isabelle Huppert, writer/director Pialat infused with a good deal of autobiographical detail; given the mainly unsympathetic characters involved, it doesn't do him any compliments - and he does seem to have been a troubled man, as Huppert also says that Pialat often disappeared for days on end during the shoot! The acting is uniformly excellent, however; despite their relatively young age, Huppert and co-star Gerard Depardieu (as the title character!) were already at the forefront of modern French stars - a status which, with varying degrees of success, they both still hold to this day.I have 3 more of Pialat's films in my "VHS To Watch" pile, albeit all in French without English Subtitles; due to this fact but also LOULOU'S oppressive realism - in spite of its undeniable artistic merit - I can't say that I'm in any particular hurry to check them out now...

Director Maurice Pialat's film is more an exercise in star power than any presentation of narrative, with Isabelle Huppert leaving her husband Guy Marchand for the leather-clad ex-con ruffian Loulou played by Depardieu. Even though the tone takes its cue from the character of Loulou as a womanising drifter, the low key seemingly improvised rambling scenes are preferable to the gab-fests of Eric Rohmer, who is responsible for the negative connotations associated with French films by Americans. This film is actually mistitled since although it is Depardieu that is the catalyst for Huppert to change her life, the story is more hers than his. Or perhaps it is that the representation of her crumbling marriage that is more dramatically interesting than Depardieu's "loafing". If Loulou's character is sketched thinly that may to keep him as an enigma, the mysterious bad-boy that women always seem to prefer. At one point Huppert says of Depardieu, "I prefer a loafer who f**ks, to a rich guy who bugs me". And although we can see how limiting Depardieu's world is to Huppert, we also understand her attraction to him, highlighted by a silent image of the couple stumbling down a street in a drunken embrace. Pialat's best moments involve scenes of violence interrupting - a family get together soured by jealousy, the loud music of a disco drowning out shouting, and a brawl between Depardieu and Marchand in a courtyard with a following drink together as evidence of the French form of civilised behaviour. Huppert also has an early scene with Marchand where the camera follows his pursuit and humiliation of her, and here Huppert's anger invalidates the myth of her as a passive performer. The film also shows us footage of her laughing, which is unusual since her situations are usually so glum, and she is funny when she yells in shocked reaction to being hit, in the famous love scene where the bed collapses, and when she falls in the street by accident. Pialat also gives Marchand a laugh by having him resort to playing the saxophone in depression.