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The Maurice Pialat protagonist already unmistakable at the age of ten, angry and vulnerable and primed for combat with the world. "Full employment for a decent life," demands a banner during a street protest, at a nearby café the boy (Michel Terrazon) filches a wristwatch off the counter so he can later shatter it in the toilet. "Un terreur" who drops his stepsister's cat down a flight of stairs, his foster parents have had enough. (He buys the frayed mother a gift before heading back to foster care, she unwraps it and heads to the sink to wash dishes and the suppressed emotion suddenly suggests Ozu in industrial northern France.) A kindly elderly couple (Marie-Louise Thierry and René Thierry) take him into their home, his closest bond is with the bent grandmother who giggles at risqué comic-books, cf. Pather Panchali. His gangling roommate sizes him up less generously after nearly taking a dagger to the face, "you'll end up a criminal!" Pialat's magnificently unsentimental observation of a tiny, opaque vandal, tender in its pugnacity. Childhood in all its contradictory joy and agony, the spontaneous embrace that follows the ferocious tantrum, as bewildering to the juvenile as to the grown-ups around him. Anderson's Thursday's Children figures in the assistance publique portraiture, lifeworn interiors evoke Chardin. He watches a lout carve initials on his arm while waiting for a Western in the theater, then asks for money for the cobbler and kicks the shoe down a sewer. Schoolyard scuffles, wedding chansons, Resistance reminiscences. Hurling spikes at cars from an overpass is the last straw, a letter from the reformatory marks the brusque but not hopeless coda. "He's a handful, but he's got a good heart." Loach has Kes the following year. With Linda Gutenberg, Raoul Billerey, Henri Puff, Maurice Coussonneau, and Marie Marc.
--- Fernando F. Croce |