La gueule ouverte is in some senses one of Maurice Pialat’s
smaller scale films – following the final weeks of Monique, spent at home in a
small town after discharged by a Paris hospital, watched over by her shopkeeper
husband, occasionally visited by her son Philippe and less often by his wife
Nathalie – but as large as any of them in the extraordinary, frank honesty of
its observation and its evocative capacity. Both father and son are established
as fairly active adulterers, and yet in Philippe’s case at least this coexists
with an apparently highly active sex life with Nathalie – the film presents
such compulsiveness in all its sometimes glorious, sometimes desperate inevitability,
understanding that those involved may make their peace with it, or maintain
their own stories (the film withholds much information about Nathalie in
particular): still, at least through modern eyes, the father’s behaviour toward
his customers calls out for some form of “me too” intervention. But at the same
time, the film’s use of nudity sums up Pialat’s imposing honesty – his observation
of a woman who cleans herself and gets dressed after a brief encounter with
Pierre later stunningly echoed by the observation of Monique’s naked body lifted
from her deathbed. The moments leading to her death are observed with great
gravity and respect, every anguished breath rewriting the air around it:
afterwards Pialat succinctly establishes how some things are forever changed,
while others continue with their usual banality. The contrast between the film’s second-last shot - looking out from the back of Philippe’s car as he drives away, at first down the town’s
poky streets and then onto the highway back toward the city - and the closing view of the father (alone in his shop, turning off the lights) seems to
evoke the conversation between the cosmic and the earthbound, confirming that
the film was all along far more huge in scope than the everyday sum of its
parts.
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