Graduate First (Pialat, 1978): BFI Southbank, NFT2, 8.45pm
This is part of a mini-season of Maurice Pialat films at BFI Southbank. Details here. The film also screens on August 18th and 21st.Harvard Film Archive introduction:
After two false starts and a large part of the budget spent,
Pialat reworked the concept and the script for the third time,
assembling a few professional teenage actors and filling in the
rest of the cast with amateurs culled from Lens, the same province of
Naked Childhood. While much of the wandering narrative was
scripted as they shot—often from the teenagers’ actual
conversations of the day before—at other times the actors would
just be hanging out and not realize they were being filmed. Pass
Your Exams First follows no single character or primary focus,
as if, like its confused subjects teetering on the edge of maturity
and responsibility, it is experimenting with various paths without
knowing quite where any of them will lead. The most comic entry in
Pialat’s oeuvre, the film follows the group’s antics in school,
at home and on holiday, and at the only hot spot, the town’s actual
café. With limited options at a time of shifting traditions and
economies, they engage in fleeting couplings, contradictory opinions,
vague dreams and their own false starts. Presciently inscribed by the
hand of Pialat, their lives remain a series of question marks …
awkwardly, ambivalently, precisely rendered question marks.
