Fill 'Er Up with Super

(Le Plein de super, Alain Cavalier, France, 1976)

The career of French director Alain Cavalier – still ongoing in his 90s – has traced an unusual and inspiring path.

From making relatively commercial films with stars including Catherine Deneuve and Michel Piccoli in the 1960s, he leapt first to electronic video in the 1980s and later digital technology, becoming a veritable one-person-crew for intimate, minimalist, diaristic pieces.

Fill 'Er Up with Super marked the decisive, mid ‘70s turning point: shot on 35mm but in a deliberately no-frills, unspectacular style, it uses a script largely invented (but not improvised) by the actors.

It’s a road movie about four young men (played by Patrick Bouchitey, Étienne Chicot, Bernard Crombey and Xavier Saint-Macary) – mucking about with each other, and each not-so-secretly nursing their own relationship problems. Women (Béatrice Agenin, Nathalie Baye) make fleeting but always piercing appearances. It’s almost a low-key, more mundane version of John Cassavetes’ Husbands (1970).

There’s no catharsis, no real progression in Cavalier’s characters, and hardly any eventful drama. If you’re expecting either the intensity of a Maurice Pialat film or the zany humor of Jacques Rozier, look elsewhere.

The DVD/Blu-ray presentation by Radiance (UK) of the 2K restoration is impeccable. While the contemporaneous review from Positif by Évelyne Carin-Lowins (translated for the booklet) accuses the film of “aggressive misogyny,” the comments offered from a 21st century perspective by Charlotte Garson and Murielle Joudet stress the air of melancholia, failure, disappointment, blockage and all-round “masculine despair” permeating proceedings.

Fill ‘Er Up with Super is more successful in moments – such as the heartbreaking delivery by one guy of his small son back to the mother’s arms on a train platform – than as a whole. But it’s well worth discovering.

MORE Cavalier: Libera Me, Vies, Être vivant et le savoir, Le Rencontre

© Adrian Martin 2 July 2023