After a brief one month hiatus from the blog due to production on my latest cinematic endeavor, I return today with an observation on the causal roots of unsuspecting humor in Maurice Pialat's ice cold portrait of terminal illness and grieving in The Mouth Agape (1974).
To preface, the film is my formal introduction to Pialat and of all the ones I could've chosen to break the ice with, this was perhaps the most unfitting and ill-timed given recent, upsetting events. Feeling the same edge of weight as I'm sure most are currently, the ultimate sense of guilty realization hit me like a ton of bricks halfway through as the concatenation of misogynistic male libido amongst the harrowing permeation of tragic mortality excavated deep laughs I wasn't even aware existed for a film such as this one. I was both immediately shocked and horrified by what Pialat had managed to do, and how invisibly this manipulation comes about. A little over a week removed from my initial viewing, I find myself still wrestling with how exactly Pialat's extract of humor where there virtually is none, arises. Is it an act of deliberation, or am I just potty brained? Both are likely true.
I think I have some explanation, but it surely isn't complete either. But let's dig into what floored me.
The film follows Philippe (played by Philippe Leotard), a young Frenchman who finds himself back in close acquaintance with his sickly mother Monique (played by Monique Melinand). Philippe is acquiescent and seemingly absent-minded about what goes on in and around his immediate settings. His one facial expression, which is that of a simplistic cherubic grin, is worn for duration without change. Philippe is doltish and devoid of agency and as we come to find out through an earlier conversation with Monique (capped off by an amazing diegetic reprieve), is also unfaithful to his girlfriend Nathalie (played by Nathalie Baye). Philippe is simply a pathetic potato of a man, a character who follows in the footsteps of his father Roger, played by (you guessed it) Hubert Deschamps, a droopy faced man with a hunched figure and always seen with a cigarette protruding like a proud phallic symbol from his lips. First acknowledged in the same conversation by Monique but not present in the film til a little later, Roger's perverse proclivities may simply be the most turgid displays of male horniness ever committed to celluloid, given what is happening at the center. And it also happens to be some of the funniest shit ever.
As Monique's health begins to gradually deteriorate, the weight of her impending mortality becomes ever so clearer. At first transitioning to an extended hospital stay to at-home hospice care, the physical transformation Monique undergoes from mild fatigue to being bed ridden, gray skinned, and reduced vocally to incoherent screeches for speech is not only incredibly harrowing, but depressing to the most lifeless degree. Monique is dying a slow and painful death. So what do her husband and son do amidst this crisis? They turn to their genitals for consolation.
From the time Monique's two immediate family are tasked with aiding in her departure, laced in within this grief stricken drama, is a surprise sex comedy that sees the gross libidinous exploits of Philippe and Roger during this process. Philippe casually sleeps with a younger woman behind Nathalie's back before endlessly engaging in all forms of shameless coital acts upon her return (often in the same house as his dying mother nonetheless) and Roger makes consistent attempts for his own hot action with a woman who frequents the family shop (even happily fondling her breasts at one point). While not completely abandoning Monique, as the two men still show intimate care during bedside visits, however abhorrent each may be, this excess of behavior obviously renders as flat out repulsive.
So why do I find this so funny? It stems from Pialat's dryest of dry approach to the entire thing, which then renders as deadpan. It's so bafflingly preposterous, that Philippe and Roger's cruel and aloof steadfastness manages to cross over into the surreal. The antics of the men are too ludicrous to comprehend, yet the film sees this as it does the rest of the material, for what it is. So the excess cannot be helped but seen as some hidden gesturing for farce. What rouses my intrigue most is how meticulously Pialat constructs his reality by merely observing what is immediately before him. I refer to his approach as deadpan, but that startling realization doesn't make itself known right away. For the duration of the film, Pialat refrains from any empathetic leaning. What is most often seen in the mise-en-scene is shot composition so neutral and editing cut so subjectively, that it leaves no room for narrative bias to sprout. We are left to our own devices. The images are composites for each's own temporal subjectivity. And it is within this formal structuring that allows for Pialat to mischievously mine for laughs. We don't expect Philippe and Roger's shenanigans to escalate like they do, and when it happens, they go unpunished. It is neither played up or played down. They just do like its justifiably second nature. The film permits these two walking pairs of testicles to gallivant without any moral posturing. For as pitiful as all of it is, you really can't help but laugh, both in astonishment and in buffoonery.
While Pialat reconfigures again for the film's final moments, resulting in an inevitable confrontation for the two men, the time spent keeping their second heads in check sees the film stand out as one of the more idiosyncratic portraits of grief and mourning in cinema. Pialat so effortlessly plays with the varying avenues of which grief can manifest and in this case, takes the form of constant sexual fulfillment. But it is this acting out as response to grief which opens up a revelation so sly, yet abundantly obvious, that Pialat's kitsch gains a profound new level of audacity for me. The title of the film is itself an inside joke. There is obvious allusion to Monique's later physical stage, which sees her mouth often left open, accompanied by low droning gurgles and other inaudible vocalizations as she mercilessly fights for her life, but it also refers to the vacancy of Philippe and Roger as two bumbling idiots for men. All three have their mouths agape and so does ours at the sheer lunacy of it all.... brilliant.
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