Dir. Maurice Pialat. 1972, 110 mins. 35mm. With Marlène Jobert, Jean Yanne, Macha Méril.
The specter of regret haunts this punishingly personal film, in which Pialat, beneath a thin patina of fiction, conducted an autopsy on his own long-running affair with a younger woman. Jean Yanne plays the moody, sometimes-brutal substitute for the director, while Marlène Jobert plays his companion, a working-class secretary who aids him in furthering his stalled career. Pialat compared his film to Ravel’s “Boléro,” structured as it is as a cycle of recurring lovers’ quarrels, a fight to the end that reaches an unexpected, poignant outcome. “All this happened to me. I made the film to remove an obsession.” —Maurice Pialat

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