The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, October 21-27
The Mouth Agape (1974)
Directed by Maurice Pialat
In Pialat’s wounded masterpiece, insidiousness is a form of communion, and the nuclear family is doomed from the start. After a verbalized list of disappointments exchanged with her son (Philippe Léotard), Monique (Monique Mélinand) falls prey to an unspecified illness. When her condition quickly worsens, she becomes a bedridden locus for the sins of her racist, philandering husband (Hubert Deschamps) and Philippe, who both undergo their own impolitic, private reckoning with life’s impermanence. Such bleak subject matter is transformed through Pialat’s searingly digressive and unsentimental view of his characters, who are profoundly (and sympathetically) uncomfortable with existence. Time is disarmingly fluid, pockmarked by events; his sequences alternate between desperate, tender and blackly comic modes, with D.P. Nestor Almendros’s typically immaculate exposures. The total effect is irreducible, with an impression less of Pialat’s desire to purge his own personal demons than to doggedly lay bare their contradictions. The theme of death as nature’s great equalizer has rarely been as tonally complex or bracingly observed. Micah Gottlieb (October 24, 4:30pm at the Museum of the Moving Image’s Pialat series)