French film director Maurice Pialat: Controversial Cannes winner
CANNES, France, July 4, 2016 (AFP) - French film director and actor Maurice Pialat was one of the Cannes Film Festival's most controversial winners.
He ended a 21-year-drought for French film directors at the world's most prestigious film festival on May 20, 1987, but failed to appease his critics.
Pialat was known for his insightful and unflinching examinations of less glamorous aspects of French society such as marital problems and adolescence.
The bristly and demanding director was also renowned for stormy, sometimes even violent, directing sessions, and made little concession to popular taste despite his relative lack of commercial success.
"Under the Sun of Satan" (Sous le Soleil du Satan), is a complex religious and moral drama about the trials and tribulations of a French priest. Based on the 1926 novel of the same name by Georges Bernanos it tells the story of a devout priest who becomes involved with a murderess. The film is about mysticism and God's grace.
Clenched fist scandal
As he walked on stage to loud boos to receive the coveted award, he created one of the festival's biggest scandals waving a clenched fist at the audience and saying: "If you don't like me, I can tell you that I don't like you either".
"You have to remain calm, which is not always the case with me," Pialat told reporters after receiving the Palme d'or at the 40th festival. "Remain calm and work, the rest does not matter," he added.
The film, which critics said was boring but was beautifully made, starred Gerard Depardieu and Sandrine Bonnaire, both actors in earlier works by the director.
Pialat was born in August 1925 in the Puy de Dome region in central France and died in 2003 aged 77. At the time of his death, French director producer and longtime friend Daniel Toscan du Plantier hailed Pialat as "the true heir to Jean Renoir," France's most respected filmmaker in the middle of the 20th century.
"He was the father of an entire generation of today's film makers, and young female directors specifically never stop referring to him", he said.
Pialat also directed the 1980 work "Loulou" featuring Depardieu and Isabelle Huppert, a study of middle-class ennui, which was received with indifference at Cannes. Depardieu also featured in the 1985 drama "Police" alongside Sophie Marceau.
Pialat directed, co-wrote and starred in the 1983 psychological drama "To Our Loves" (A Nos Amours) with Bonnaire -- in only her second film at age 16 -- as a promiscuous teenager suffering from severe emotional problems.
The film won two Cesars, the French equivalent of the Oscar, one for best film and the other for Bonnaire as most promising young actress.
In 1991 Pialat, who started out as a painter, directed "Van Gogh," a two-and-a-half-hour biopic starring Jacques Dutronc. The review of the last year of the Dutchman's troubled life was one of his last films.