Loulou (Maurice Pialat France, 1980)

In a crowded nightclub, Nelly (Isabelle Huppert), bourgeois-bred and married to an advertising executive, is taking her passions out for air. She finds herself dancing with a happy, drunken lout, leaves with him, and stays with him. Maurice Pialat, consummate director of character, explores a woman's multifarious desires for sexual liberation in Loulou. (The film is drawn from the life of the screenwriter Arlette Langmann.) Though the title carries the name of Gérard Depardieu's leather-jacketed lothario Loulou, it is as object, not subject. Depardieu graciously plays along, before our eyes calibrating his outsized, undereducated, hypersexual character to Huppert/Nelly's perception of him. Nelly and Loulou make stabs at normal living—she continues to work for her husband, they play their part in a typically animated Pialat family gathering. But when they walk off into the night at film's end, it's not forever after, but until desire is played out.

Part of the Love Exists: Maurice Pialat series at the BAM/PFA.

Free gallery admission with same-day film ticket!