Bertrand Blier, an acclaimed director whose movies scandalized, captivated and entertained Nineteen Seventies and ’80s France with their typically brutal projections of French males’s sexual imaginations, died on Monday at his dwelling in Paris. He was 85.
His dying was confirmed by his son Léonard Blier.
For twenty years Mr. Blier was one in every of France’s most adorned administrators, profitable the grand prize at Cannes, an Academy Award for finest international movie for “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” launched in 1978, and quite a few Césars, France’s equal of the Oscar.
In a press release after his dying, President Emmanuel Macron saluted Mr. Blier (pronounced blee-AY) as a “big of French cinema, who marked our nationwide creativeness for 5 many years together with his free, biting contact.”
Mr. Blier launched the careers of women and men who would dominate the French display for many years, together with Gérard Depardieu, with whom he made 9 movies. One among Mr. Blier’s final public acts was to hitch others in France’s movie group to return to Mr. Depardieu’s protection in 2023 within the face of sexual harassment and assault accusations in opposition to the actor. (Mr. Macron additionally defended Mr. Depardieu, who now faces prison fees and a March trial.)
Mr. Blier’s legacy is contested for a similar causes as Mr. Depardieu’s. His better-known movies, and particularly his breakthrough in 1974, “Les Valseuses” (“Going Locations”), starring Mr. Depardieu, are permeated with misogyny and depictions of ladies as intercourse objects. Billed as a darkish comedy, “Going Locations” — the French title is slang for “testicles” — was an unlimited field workplace success on its launch, drawing an viewers of almost six million.
The movie captured a facet of the French male creativeness, and French tradition, that sees girls as our bodies current to fulfill the wants of males.
“Going Locations” is a road-and-buddy-movie rampage of rape, sexual assault and informal theft perpetrated by two hoodlums in opposition to a grim backdrop of empty working-class suburbs and deserted seashore cities. But it surely’s additionally cloaked in incongruous lightheartedness, enhanced by a jaunty rating by the jazz violinist and composer Stephane Grappelli.
The movie was seen by some critics as a well-aimed kick on the stultifying materialism of postwar bourgeois France. In 1978, Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, referred to as it “an explosively humorous erotic farce — each a celebration and a satire of males’s daydreams.” She referred to as it “flagrantly humorous.”
Not everyone was amused. There have been demonstrations in entrance of some film theaters the place it was exhibiting, and the newspaper Le Figaro demanded that or not it’s banned. One notably nasty scene exhibits the 2 buddies sexually assaulting a nursing mom, performed by Brigitte Fossey, in an empty prepare automobile.
Invited onto a French tv program final March, Ms. Fossey refused to observe the scene once more. The feminine lead, the French actress Miou-Miou, referred to as the filming “humiliating.”
The film has been debated down to the current. French tv has gone forwards and backwards over whether or not “Les Valseuses” can nonetheless be proven, because it was for years; one scheduled exhibiting final yr was canceled, one other was slotted for broadcast this yr however solely at a late hour. Revisiting the movie in 1990 on the event of its revival in theaters, the critic Caryn James wrote in The New York Instances that the movie “has an unsightly undertone.”
“The 2 pals performed by Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere prey on girls in a merciless and contemptuous means,” she wrote, including that “by making a stream of ladies who select to be seduced and mistreated by the boys, the movie strongly suggests that every one girls are whores.”
None of Mr. Blier’s subsequent movies equaled the industrial success of “Les Valseuses,” although a quantity trafficked in related themes, albeit much less brutally. In “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” the Depardieu character provides his depressed spouse to a stranger, to make her joyful; she winds up sleeping with a 13-year-old. In “Beau-Père” (1981) a stepfather has an affair together with his 14-year-old stepdaughter; in 1981, the Instances critic Janet Maslin mentioned the affair was “introduced with one thing lower than Nabokovian acuity,” however “its exploitative aspect can be minimal,” saying, “Mr. Blier tells this story very gently.”
In “Too Lovely for You,” the 1989 Grand Prize winner at Cannes, the plot twist is Mr. Depardieu’s abandonment of his stunning spouse, performed by Carole Bouquet, for his a lot plainer secretary (Josiane Balasko). “Their lovemaking is flat-out eroticism, which Mr. Blier data with steamy humor and fact,” Vincent Canby wrote in The Instances.
By the early Nineties, Mr. Blier had largely stopped making movies that had been profitable; the instances appeared to have handed him by. In a retrospective on the France Tradition radio station this week, the Cahiers du Cinema critic Yal Sadat famous what he referred to as the “paradox” of Mr. Blier’s profession.
“He turned French society the wrong way up and captured the spirit of the ’70s,” he mentioned in an interview on the channel. However, Mr. Sadat added, “Since that point, he has been relegated to being a relic of the period, as if he was trapped by the interval that he captured so nicely.”
Mr. Blier himself denied being a misogynist. In an interview with the French tv character Thierry Ardisson, he mentioned, “The dumbest fools in my movies are all the time the fellows.” To the suggestion that he was preoccupied with intercourse, he responded: “What else do you wish to speak about? Sports activities? There may be dying, intercourse, girls.”
In 2010, he advised France Tradition: “I like those that are misplaced, the losers,” suggesting that profitable folks bored him. “In cinema,” he mentioned, “there’s the necessity for a sure violence.”
Bertrand Blier was born on March 14, 1939, within the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, the son of Bernard Blier, a well known character actor in French cinema, and Gisèle (Brunet) Blier, who had been a pianist. Bertrand by no means acquired his baccalauréat, the ever present French secondary college diploma, and didn’t go to college. He discovered his craft by hanging out together with his father’s actor pals and changing into, by the age of 20, a hand on the movie units of well-known French administrators.
His first movie was a documentary, “Hitler, connais pas,” (1963) — roughly translated as “Hitler, by no means heard of him” — a sequence of interviews together with his friends describing hopes and aspirations in postwar France. He went on to direct his tempestuous father — “a very powerful man in my life,” he advised an interviewer, “good-looking and seductive, very humorous” — in a 1967 function movie, “If I Had been a Spy.” However he turned to writing a novel within the early Nineteen Seventies because the cinema appeared to not be understanding for him.
That novel was the premise for “Going Locations,” for which Mr. Blier unearthed from hitherto minor roles the duo, Mr. Depardieu and Mr. Dewaere, who had been to accompany him for a lot of the subsequent decade. (Mr. Dewaere died by suicide in 1982 at 35.)
“What I did with ‘Valseuses’” — the French title — “was ignoble in its crudeness,” he as soon as advised an interviewer on the Ciné+ tv station. “And I beloved that bad-mannered side of issues.”
About Mr. Depardieu, he mentioned on France Tradition in 2010, “We had been made to work collectively.”
Mr. Blier is survived by his third spouse, the actress Farida Rahouadj; two daughters, Leïla and Béatrice Blier; a son, Léonard; a sister, Brigitte Blier; and one grandson.
“He was by no means an mental director,” Mr. Sadat, the critic, mentioned on France Tradition this week. “He was above all, sensory, and humorous.”
Susan C. Beachy, Daphné Anglès and Catherine Porter contributed analysis.
