The Mouth Agape
La Gueule ouverte
Maurice Pialat
Monique Bastide, in her fifties, has a generalised cancer and only a few months to live. Her son Philippe takes her to see her former husband Roger in a small village in Auvergne. There, she spends her last moments, in the quiet family haberdasher's shop. Around her, her ex-husband, her son and her daughter-in-law react each in their own way.
With : Hubert Deschamps, Monique Mélinand, Philippe Léotard, Nathalie Baye, Henri Saulquin, Alain Gresteau, Anna Gayanne
Screenplay : Maurice Pialat
Image : Nestor Almendros
Sound : Raymond Adam
Music : W.A. Mozart
Editing : Arlette Langmann, Bernard Dubois
Screenplay : Maurice Pialat
Image : Nestor Almendros
Sound : Raymond Adam
Music : W.A. Mozart
Editing : Arlette Langmann, Bernard Dubois
Production : Lido Films, Films de La Boétie
The film's title "comes from the scene that Léotard and Deschamps weren't able to act, the famous funeral scene where the deceased's open jaw refuses to close. It was the height of repulsion for them." (M. Pialat) "Maurice Pialat's originality is to show this woman's agony and death without any philosophy, metaphysics or moral stance, without social criticism and without naturalism. (...) No character is truly mean, but it's a horrible situation: this slow death is disturbing because it's a piece of each character's past that is disappearing." (J. Siclier)