Critics reviews

[A] masterpiece... There’s a complexity to [the film's] three characters and their respective dynamics that is difficult to convey, a complexity that is typical of Pialat’s distinct approach to character and narrative.

However you feel about Pialat's messy cruelty, his mean streak here finds its perfect avatar in Huppert's embodiment of a modern-day Madame Bovary, lured from the safety of her marriage bed into the waiting arms of a smouldering lowlife. . . . Placed in our heroine's shoes, it's an easy choice—and a tale as old as time, but Huppert's ferocity shades and contours this tired trope into a veritable tour de force.

[Loulou may] seem a little dated, but on a deeper level, it’s fully part of the influential Pialat’s audacious, experimental attempt to intersect the too-often parallel lines of inquiry of realist and ‘spiritual’ cinema – imagine an unholy marriage of, say, Cassavetes and Bresson.

The resultant work—whose screenplay, such as it was, could not actually be completed, as Depardieu and Huppert had other projects to work on—is more fractious, fragmented, and narratively oblique than [Pialat's] previous titles: a film for which the audience must build up its own response to a mystifying but engrossing sexual relationship based on an accumulation of individual snapshots.

Pialat never set out to capture the pace of life as it felt to those living it--the films progress too jarringly for that; it's even often difficult to parse how much time has elapsed between scenes and even cuts. What he came closer to was the sense of living under heightened awareness, be it from extreme passion, anger, or regret; and LOULOU, one of Pialat's greatest films, is revelatory in its understanding of all three.

[Loulou] was widely admired at the time for the rawness and riskiness of the performances... There is something a little dated about the movie's look now; it is, however, effortlessly watchable.

The highs and lows of the relationship are invested with such rare, raw honesty that the film may be downbeat, but it is never dull... [There's] so much potential for melodrama, yet Pialat never makes us feel like we're watching a soap opera.

An unforgettable exercise in street naturalism... While the performances are superb, this is much more than just an odd-couple romance, as Pialat's accumulation of telling details exposes the soulless social and sexual state of contemporary France.

[Loulou] is a study in erotic revolution; in it, sex becomes a force that shatters not only class allegiances and social patterns but even the order represented by traditional narrative structure... It’s one of the most original French films of the period, and, I think, a great one.

''Loulou'' rambles considerably and hasn't a story as interesting as its characters - or its actors, whose performances are larger and livelier than the people they play. But when it focuses coolly on Nelly and Loulou, it accomplishes something interesting, making these essentially familiar figures seem both petty and grand.

Pialat may be giving a modern continuance of the French pre-war poetic, naturalistic dramas with worker and sub-proletariat types. But he has eschewed the romanticism and added sharp modern language and an acceptance of conditions with perhaps a possibility of changing them.