Loulou (1980)

 

Loulou

This was a difficult movie to get behind. Not that it is surreal or obscure in Godard fashion, but it took me a very long time before I got any idea what story it was the movie was trying to sell and even then, I am not certain this is story I need to watch.

Nelly (Isabelle Huppert) is married to André (Guy Marchand) but prefers to be together with Loulou (Gérard Depardieu). “Together” meaning having a lot of sex with Loulou. André is understandably not happy with the situation. He is upset she is leaving, and he is upset she prefers a guy like Loulou to him. He wants her out, yet he cannot let her go. Nelly just does whatever she feels like. Sometimes she goes back to André, sometimes she stays with Loulou. She is not very reflective about why she does what she does, she just responds to her impulses.

It is obvious that Nelly’s marriage to André is dysfunctional. We do not know if André was like this before she left, but he does have temper and aggression issues and is likely a controlling character. The question I ask myself is, why then Loulou?

Loulou is just out of jail with no intension of stopping his criminal career as he does not believe in working. Instead, he just hangs out all day. He has had about a million affairs with all sorts of girls, and he is very frequently drunk. Nelly could not have chosen a worse partner.

Nelly’s argument for preferring to be with Loulou is that he can go on longer when they are having sex and that he is there for her all the time. No wonder, the guy does absolutely nothing with his life. I could sort of accept the sex argument if Gerard was offering something special, but his version sex is very vanilla and in fact he and his friends have a very casual and unromantic attitude to sex and women which can best be described as exploitative and disrespectful. Yet, for all his flaws, Loulou is the exact opposite of André and that might be the clue to Nelly’s attraction to him. Does she really love him or is it part of some sort of rebellion against André?

Nelly gets deeper and deeper involved in Loulou’s world and even becomes an accomplice to his criminal affairs, but only when she gets pregnant does she start reflecting. Not that Loulou is bad for her, but only that maybe this is not a relationship to raise a child in. Well, at least that.

Nelly is such a princess. A character who always get what she wanted, who expect her actions have no consequences, who has her own gratification as a first priority and expects the world to conform to her needs. I hardly need to mention that I did not sympathize with her one bit and that is a problem when she is the central character. Of course, I did not like André or Loulou either. Or his criminal friends or the silly, needy girls that hang on to Loulou and his friends. There is just an entire world here that is so far from my own that I find it hard to relate and much less sympathize. In fact, whenever the situation goes ballistic, I feel they have it coming and deserve each other.

So, why do I need to watch this movie? The only answer I can give is, that this is a gender switch on the man running off with a prettier, but useless, girl because the sex is better, but with little thought on anything else. If men can do it, why not women? Is this reason enough? For me, no. If I could somehow have related to any of the characters, it might have been different. As it is, I could not care less and if any of the principals had any grain of sense, they would have done the same and just left the others alone.

Director Maurice Pialat was nominated for the Palme D’Or. Must have been a poor year in Cannes.

Not recommended unless you get a kick out of watching idiots messing up their lives.