The Mouth Agape

A woman is dying of cancer and her family brings her to the flat above the shop in the provincial town. Her husband keeps the shop open and makes passes at the customers. Her son comes from Paris, stays with his wife, and does the same. She lies in bed. The days pass. The subject is not death but life around it never stopping. The family grieve and are also bored, eat, argue and have sex. The film shows this not as criticism but as it is, and the discomfort comes from that. The form is bare. Maurice Pialat uses no music, the scenes run long without cuts and the camera waits in the room. The death arrives with no preparation at all. The production rests on the death of the director's own mother. Pialat said so openly and described reconstructing the days he spent in that room; the details of the illness and the behaviour of the family come directly from it. Nathalie Baye plays the daughter-in-law, Hubert Deschamps the husband, Philippe Léotard the son and Monique Mélinand the dying woman. Who it is for: viewers who like French realism and unadorned family films. Who it is not for: anyone with a recent loss of this kind; the film softens nothing and offers no consolation.