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Maurice Pialat’s La maison des bois, playing in New York this weekend at the Museum of the Moving Image's retrospective on the director, consists of seven episodes each about an hour long. The series follows Hervé (Hervé Levy), a young boy living in a “house in the woods” with foster parents Albert (Pierre Doris) and Jeanne (Jacqueline Dufranne), and is set during WWII. Hervé hangs out, gets into trouble, goes to school. His father (Paul Crauchet) is in the army; his mother left them before the film’s events. The story overlaps in many ways with Pialat’s previous film, L’enfance nue, to the point where it’s easy to assume that Pialat was tapping the same autobiographical well for both projects. Maison, however, is looser and more expansive than usual for Pialat, and consequently more direct about his concerns. While there’s a great deal of detail in any Pialat work,...