How can a film about a murder committed in the 1830s and serving as the basis for a famous case study by Michel Foucault tell us about an irrational crime? Moi, Pierre Riviére, Ayant égorgé ma mére, mon souer, et mon frére shows us a portrait of a young man who kills his mother, brother and sister. But the film seems to be more interested in the townspeople’s faces, their hypocrisies and the banality of life in the township of Normandy circa the 1830s.
For me, the lesser-known (but highly skilled) French director Rene Allio strikes a note between the banal portrait of town and family life, with the spectre of the crime and case study looming over every shot. Moi, Pierre Riviére… is not about motives. If anything, it is about the deception of crime and reason. It is a superbly deceptive film.
Allio brilliantly conveys the banality of town and family life, all the while allowing Pierre’s parricide to loom over the narrative. Never going for the traditional thrills of plotted-out narrative twists, he is often compared to Bresson for his use of historical documents (Pierre Riviére’s actual confession), the steady detachment of his shots, and using non-actors. A bit like Bresson’s Mouchette, we don’t necessarily get a motivated or psychotic deviant, but a quiet, pensive observant one. It is wise to paint a picture of Pierre as observant. In a town with little creative outlets, Pierre’s fantasies lean towards violent manifestations: birds pinned by nails to trees, making a horse leap off a dangerously steep drop and fall, a strange Da Vinci-esque weapon made of sickles and farm tools that Pierre later buries, and eventually the actual murder.
The story easily translates to contemporary catastrophes like Columbine and the Virginia Tech shooting. In these banal environments where town and family life become opressively sterile, dull, and hypocritical, a character like Pierre has no outlet but his violent fantasy, whose assault is realized against the audience of the town itself. Somehow, his violent tinderbox fantasy fits in to the town’s bucolic pulse. A contemporary mirror to this film could be the first half of Gus van Sant’s Elephant (before he screws up the film by focusing it on the killers and their preparations). One reason why Moi, Pierre Riviére… doesn’t become clouded by Pierre’s crime is precisely because of the insrutability of what appears to be a tortured, repetitious fantasy that is thrust into reality, almost spontaneously—like breaking a wall.
Allio portrays the mother’s histrionics and excesses as hyprocritically excused by the town. Instead, Pierre’s quiet and patient father is largely victim to the mother’s whims, which Pierre becomes increasingly unable to tolerate. Pierre’s mother, Madame Riviére (brilliantly played by Jacqueline Millere), seems outrageous in her coying manipulation of her children’s judgments about the world and their father. In one scene, after running up a high debt buying high-priced gowns in town, necessitating the foreclosure of their home, Mme Riviére refuses to leave and is pulled out by the father, kicking and screaming and crying abuse. Seeming to live under the fickle life of the moment, she is unable to seea bigger picture of consequence and action. When Pierre later says his murder was “an act of God”, he is allowing himself to be the decisive judge.
Moi, Pierre Riviére is a film about a cruel crime, a film about a famous case study about the crime, and a film that let’s the recreation exist, in a distanced, detached sort of way. It would seem that the townspeople, in their testimonies, all knew Pierre was crazy and there’s a large array of answers given for his crime, including Satanic alliances, insanity and a cruel and evil nature.
The question of insanity, as in the Columbine and Virginia Tech cases, looms largely over the trial proceedings at the end of Moi, Pierre Riviére…, but is eventually dismissed by the film. What Allio portrays is a stifling environment without creative release or books to expand the mind (it is mentioned that Pierre attained one encyclopedia, which he drew from to justify mysoginist interpretations). Instead, we see someone stuck in the frame of their own stifling family narrative. The film and it’s (non) actors remains distant and remote in order to put us inside the vacuum of that claustrophobic state of life.
The opaqueness of the performers gives a certain alienation to the film. Allio stands back and allows images to remain images, painted by one decisive eruption—the murder—and causing us to ask for reasons why until we’re okay with not knowing anymore.
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