Bertrand Blier, an acclaimed director whose movies scandalized, captivated and entertained France within the Nineteen Seventies and Nineteen Eighties with their generally brutal projections of the sexual creativeness of French males, died Monday at his residence in Paris. He was 85.
His loss of life was confirmed by his son, Leonard Blier.
For twenty years, Mr. Blier was one among France’s most adorned administrators, successful the highest prize at Cannes, the Academy Award for Finest International Language Movie for “Get out your tissues” launched in 1978 and quite a few Césars, the French equal of an Oscar.
In a press release after his loss of life, President Emmanuel Macron hailed Mr. Bliet (pronounced blee-AY) as “an enormous of French cinema who marked our nationwide creativeness for 5 a long time together with his free, biting contact.”
Mr. Blier launched the careers of women and men who would dominate the French display screen for many years, together with Gerard Depardieu, with whom he made 9 movies. Certainly one of Mr Blier’s final public acts was to affix others within the French movie group to defend Mr Depardieu in 2023. within the face of accusations of sexual harassment and assault towards the actor. (Mr Macron additionally defended Mr Depardieu, who now faces legal expenses and a trial in March).
Mr. Blier’s legacy is contested for a similar causes as Mr. Depardieu’s. His better-known movies, and particularly his 1974 breakthrough, ”Les Valseuses” (‘Going Locations’), starring Mr. Depardieu, are steeped in misogyny and depictions of ladies as intercourse objects. Billed as a darkish comedy, Going Locations – the French title is slang for “testicles” – was an enormous field workplace hit on its launch, attracting an viewers of almost six million.
The movie captured a facet of the French male creativeness and French tradition that noticed ladies as our bodies current to fulfill males’s wants.
“Going Locations” is a movie about rape, sexual assault and the occasional theft dedicated by two hoodlums towards the grim backdrop of empty working-class suburbs and deserted coastal cities. However it’s additionally coated in an inappropriate levity, enhanced by a jaunty rating by the jazz violinist and composer Stefan Grappelli.
The movie was seen by some critics as a well-directed jab on the heady materialism of post-war bourgeois France. In 1978 Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, known as it “an explosively humorous erotic farce—each a celebration and a satire of male goals.” She known as it “extremely humorous.”
Not everybody was amused. There have been demonstrations in entrance of some cinemas the place it was proven, and the newspaper Le Figaro known as for it to be banned. One notably disagreeable scene reveals the 2 associates sexually assaulting a moist nurse, performed by Bridget Fossey, in an empty carriage.
Invited to seem on a French tv program final March, Ms Fossey refused to look at the scene once more. The feminine lead, French actress Miu-Miu, known as the pictures “humiliating”.
The movie is debated to at the present time. French TV debates whether or not “Les Valseuses” can nonetheless be proven because it has been for years; one scheduled exhibiting final 12 months was cancelled, one other was set to air this 12 months, however solely within the late hour. Rewatching the movie in 1990. on its theatrical revival, critic Karin James wrote in The New York Instances that the movie “has an unsightly undertone”.
“The 2 associates, performed by Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Devaer, assault ladies in a merciless and despicable approach,” she wrote, including that “by making a stream of ladies who select to be seduced and abused by males, the movie strongly suggests that each one ladies are whores.”
None of Mr. Blier’s subsequent movies have been capable of match the industrial success of ”Les Valseuses,” though lots of them cope with related themes, if much less brutally. In Take Out Your Handkerchiefs, Depardieu’s character presents his depressed spouse to a stranger to make her blissful; she seems to be sleeping with a 13 12 months outdated. In Beau-Père (1981), a stepfather has an affair together with his 14-year-old stepdaughter; in 1981 Instances critic Janet Maslin mentioned the affair was “introduced with one thing lower than Nabokovian acuity,” however “its exploitative aspect can also be minimal,” saying, “Mr. Blier tells this story very tenderly.
In “Too Lovely for You,” winner of the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1989, the plot twist is Mr. Depardieu’s abandonment of his stunning spouse, performed by Carole Bouquet, for his a lot plainer secretary (Josian Balasco). . “Their love-making is pure erotica, which Mr. Blair data with searing humor and reality,” wrote Vincent Canby in The Instances.
By the early Nineteen Nineties, Mr. Blier had largely stopped making profitable movies; instances appear to have handed him by. In a retrospective on France Tradition radio this week, Cahiers du Cinema critic Yal Sadat famous what he known as a “paradox” in Mr. Blier’s profession.
“He turned French society the other way up and captured the spirit of the 70s,” he mentioned in an interview with the channel. However Mr Sadat added: “It has since been became a relic of the period, as if it had been trapped by the interval it captured so effectively.”
Mr. Blier himself denied being a misogynist. In an interview with French TV persona Thierry Ardison, he mentioned: “The dumbest fools in my movies are all the time the boys.” To the suggestion that he was preoccupied with intercourse, he replied: “What else do you wish to discuss? Sports activities? There’s loss of life, intercourse, ladies.”
In 2010 he instructed France Tradition: “I like those that are misplaced, the losers,” suggesting that profitable folks bore him. “In cinema,” he mentioned, “there’s a want for some violence.”
Bertrand Blier was born on March 14, 1939. within the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Biancourt, son of Bernard Bliera well-known actor in French cinema, and Giselle (Brune) Blier, who was a pianist. Bertrand by no means acquired his baccalaureate, the ever-present French highschool diploma, and didn’t attend college. He realized his commerce by hanging out together with his father’s actor associates and by the age of 20 grew to become a hand on the units of well-known French administrators.
His first movie was a documentary, “Hitler, connais pas,” (1963)—roughly translated as “Hitler, I’ve By no means Heard of Him”—a collection of interviews together with his friends describing hopes and aspirations in postwar France. He went on to direct his tempestuous father – “crucial man in my life,” he instructed an interviewer, “good-looking and seductive, very humorous” – in a 1967 function movie. “If I Have been a Spy.” However he turned to novel writing within the early Nineteen Seventies, as cinema didn’t appear to swimsuit him.
That novel was the premise of ”Going Locations,” for which Mr. Blier introduced out from hitherto minor roles the duo, Mr. Depardieu and Mr. Deware, who had been to accompany him for a lot of the subsequent decade. (Mr. Dewaere died by suicide in 1982. aged 35.)
“What I did with ‘Valseuses’ – the French title – ‘was ignoble in its crudeness,'” he as soon as instructed an interviewer on the Ciné+ tv station. “And I liked that unmannerly side of issues.”
Of Mr Depardieu, he instructed France Tradition in 2010: “We’re made to work collectively.”
Mr. Blier is survived by his third spouse, the actress Farida Rahouaj; two daughters, Leïla and Béatrice Blier; a son, Leonard; sister Brigitte Blier; and one grandson.
“He was by no means an mental director,” Mr. Sadat, the critic, mentioned in France Tradition this week. “He was firstly sensual and humorous.”
Susan S. Beachy, Daphne Angles and Catherine Porter contributed analysis.
