L'Enfance nue (1968)
Directed by Maurice Pialat

Film Review

Maurice Pialat's first full-length film, L'Enfance nue is a remarkably effective piece of social realist drama depicting a disturbed young boy failing to integrate with the world around him.  The film is almost a re-make of François Truffaut's celebrated debut feature Les 400 coups (1959), but it takes a far more realist line, using non-professional actors and a more naturalistic (near-documentary) style of editing and photography to give it a far grittier edge.  Pialat acknowledges the support given to him by Truffaut (both moral and financial) by naming his principal character François, a reference to Truffaut's own troubled and largely loveless childhood.  Pialat's filmmaking career began promisingly with a film that was both critically acclaimed and a recipient of the Prix Jean-Vigo.

The things which best characterise Pialat's work are amply illustrated in L'Enfance nue, which, with its raw brutality, proximity to real experience and non-judgemental stance, deserves to be rated as one of the director's best films.  Every character is portrayed with an extraordinary sense of realism - nothing in this film feels staged or artificial.  What Pialat does - and does so well - is to take a slice of life and to preserve it perfectly on film, adding nothing, taking nothing away.  It is this which makes his cinema so powerful and so pretty well unique.  Who could fail to be moved by the plight of the unloved François and his well-meaning foster parents, the Minguets?  Whilst Pialat's unconventional style and constant striving for veracity in his art have a tendency to alienate the spectator in some of his later films (Loulou (1980) may be his masterpiece, but it is not an easy film to engage with), here his brutally direct approach has a magnetic quality that compels you to identify with its unfortunate protagonist. L'Enfance nue is the best introduction to Pialat's work - essential viewing if you are to fully appreciate his subsequent great films, Police (1985) and Sous le soleil de Satan (1987).

Film Synopsis

Abandoned by his own parents, François, a nine-year old boy, is placed in the care of Mr and Mrs Josselin, an ordinary working class family with a young daughter of their own.  The Josselins learn that François has serious behavioural problems and he soon becomes too much for them to cope with.  As the boy's unruly conduct worsens, he is returned to social services and ends up with another adopted home.  His new foster parents are Mr and Mrs Minguet, an old couple who already have their hands full with their elderly mother and another foster child, Raoul.  For once, François appears to become settled and manages to find a genuine friend in the Minguets' frail but kind-hearted mother.  However, when the latter dies, François' behaviour suddenly takes a turn for the worse…