75 Passe ton bac d'abord...

[What A Disgrace]

Passe ton bac d'abord...



The world sometimes seems divided into two camps: those who recall their teenage years as having been an exhilarating dream, and those who remember them as having been an infernal, nightmarish hell. With all this in mind, it might do to describe Passe ton bac d'abord... [Graduate First... / Pass Your Bac First...] as Maurice Pialat's "The Best Years of Our Lives", while bearing in mind all that such a description might suggest. It's an elastic, unsparing portrait of teenage life in the suburbs of France from an era when the phrase "sixteen candles" still might have first conjured the image of flames.

A group of young actors including several local unknowns -- Philippe Marlaud, Bernard Tronczyk, Patrick Lepczynski, and Sabine Haudepin (once the little girl of Truffaut's Jules et Jim), among others -- make up the cluster of friends adrift beneath the twilight of their school years. There's drama, violence, and pot-induced laughs -- group holidays, indiscriminate sex, advances from teachers twenty-five years their seniors, attempted moves to Paris, and few prospects of passing the bac, the final set of exams French students take before embarking into the world to... do what?

Marking the last work of Pialat's turbulent cycle of films made in the 1970s, Passe ton bac d'abord... is the brilliant spiritual sequel to the great filmmaker's feature-debut L'Enfance-nue -- picked up again from a vantage ten years on from the lives of the earlier film's protagonists. The Masters of Cinema Series is proud to present Maurice Pialat's teenage drama in a beautiful new transfer for the first time on home video in the UK.

Special Features:

- An 11-minute, 2003 video interview with Pialat collaborator's Arlette Langmann and Patrick Grandperret, conducted by Serge Toubiana (former editor-in-chief of Cahiers du cinéma and director of the Cinémathèque Française). *
- Après le bac [After the Bac], a 26-minute, 2003 documentary featurette by Serge Toubiana and Sonia Buchman that catches up with the cast and setting of the film in the present era.
- Original trailer for the film, and trailers for the six other Maurice Pialat features available from The Masters of Cinema Series.
- A lengthy booklet with a new essay by filmmaker and educator Jean-Pierre Gorin, and newly translated interviews with Maurice Pialat.

[sidehacker]

Insanely high expectations for this one. It looks like the one party scene from A nos amours extended to a full feature. In other words, absolutely brilliant. Just take my wallet, MoC.

[evillights]

For the sake of symmetry with the Nous ne vieillirons pas ensemble thread:

DVDBeaver review

[Hopscotch]

Any chance we can get a Zedz write-up on this one?

[peerpee]

Finished copies in our hands. It's well on track to be in distributor's channels for release date on August 24th.

[zedz]

Any chance we can get a Zedz write-up on this one?

It's been a while since I've seen it, but it's one of the great coming-of-age movies, and I get the impression that it's the Pialat film that's been most influential on younger filmmakers. Certainly a number of the entries in the "Tous les garcons et les filles de leur age" series were heavily indebted to it, including the masterpieces US Go Home and L'eau froide. When Cahiers du cinema organised a travelling retro of crucial French films that had been championed by the magazine over the years, this was one of them (from memory, the series also included French Cancan, Lola Montes, Breathless, The 400 Blows, Lola, Ma nuit chez maud, Les Baisers de secours and Le Petit criminel).

The film demonstrates fantastic empathy for its young cast, so in that respect it's almost like an ensemble A nos amours, but it's much more about peer group relations than family ones. I rank it in the middle of Pialat's output - i.e. head and shoulders above 99% of French cinema from the last 50 years.

(Before you ask about Nous ne vieillerons pas ensemble, it was one of my least favourite Pialats, but I'm eager to revisit it. He never made a bad film.)

[foggy eyes]

All impeccable, as usual. CK's essay is worth the price of the whole package alone - it's a knock-out (esp. the closing sentiment).

[The Digital McGuffin]

DVD Times review

[GringoTex]

Pialat jerked me out of the story when he ended the film at a mere 80 minutes. Caught me completely by surprise, as I thought I was only about halfway through the film. I was loving it, and then he yanks the plug in the middle. So I'm more angry than grateful right now. I need to stew on this for a couple of weeks and then revisit the film.

[evillights]

Pialat jerked me out of the story when he ended the film at a mere 80 minutes. Caught me completely by surprise, as I thought I was only about halfway through the film. I was loving it, and then he yanks the plug in the middle. So I'm more angry than grateful right now. I need to stew on this for a couple of weeks and then revisit the film.

Pialat's features' endings are always shocking. In part because they seem to chop the film finished. (The same can be said for certain later films by Bergman.)

It's good that you say you'll think about the picture for a while and then come back to it after some time. You might come to the conclusion that the last scene, and the last shot, is as ambiguous and upsetting as some of the last scenes in Naruse. When you rewatch the Pialat film, keep in mind specifically two scenes, maybe: (1) The scene in which Elisabeth first brings Philippe home to her mother; most importantly, consider the kiss and the smile. (2) The wedding scene at the center of the picture, with special attention paid to Elisabeth's dress.

[Yojimbo]

Pialat jerked me out of the story when he ended the film at a mere 80 minutes. Caught me completely by surprise, as I thought I was only about halfway through the film. I was loving it, and then he yanks the plug in the middle. So I'm more angry than grateful right now. I need to stew on this for a couple of weeks and then revisit the film.

I watched a 'double bill' of it and 'L'Enfance' last night which were the very first Pialat films I've seen: I either have, or have on order, 4 more of his films.
Although they're hugely different in tone, of course, I was regularly reminded of 'American Graffiti' while watching this.

I didn't have a problem with the ending and I probably prefer it to 'L'Enfance'
The 70's having claimed most of my teenage years I could empathise, and identify with, much of what happened in this film, which I thought was so well-judged in every respect it was untrue.
"been there, wore the haircut!"
(using many non-actors probably helped, particularly given Pialat's apparently dictatorial nature)