Bertrand Blier obituary

The Guardian

28-01-2025

Bertrand Blier, who has died aged 85, had the appearance of a placid, pipe-smoking academic and the disruptive spirit of an imp. 'My films are an aggression against people, against logic, against good sense,' the director said. He saw his role as 'attacking society: hard, repeatedly and below the belt'.
His pictures, tinged with Buñuelian mischief and often starring Gérard Depardieu, tended to begin with an outré idea which he then pursued doggedly to its conclusion. His masterpiece was Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1978), which won that year's Oscar for best foreign language film. It starts with a man (Depardieu) offering his doleful wife to a stranger in a restaurant in a bid to lift her spirits. She eventually finds fulfilment in the arms of a 13-year-old boy.
'I put my characters in a certain situation without truly understanding why,' Blier explained. 'I write the first scene and the rest is an attempt to understand why I wrote it and what it's all about. I must have in my head the same madness that I express in them, but since I'm an intellectual I transport it through my writing and images – which is why I'm not in prison yet.'
In Tenue de Soirée (1986), a burglar (Depardieu) becomes obsessed with a mousey, unassuming married man whose wife effectively agrees to pimp him out. The two men finally take to the streets as cross-dressing sex workers.
Depardieu was back in Trop Belle Pour Toi! (1989) as the manager of a car dealership who cheats on his glamorous wife with his dowdy secretary. The picture won the Grand Prix at Cannes.
'These films with Blier are of the utmost importance to me,' the actor said. Blier, who described Depardieu as his 'half-brother' and later defended him publicly in 2023 against accusations of sexual harassment and assault, said: 'When I write a film that isn't for him, he tends to sulk.'
They made nine movies together, beginning in 1974 with Les Valseuses (the title is a slang term for 'testicles'). This scandalous road-trip comedy, also known as Going Places, followed two young louts scything their way through women and property with equal disregard for both. Widely considered misogynistic, the film had an incendiary effect, kickstarting the careers of Depardieu, Isabelle Huppert and Blier himself, whose two previous features had made scant impact. Le Figaro called for it to be banned.
'There was something in Les Valseuses to offend everyone,' said the director Chris Petit. 'It was a pre-punk movie – morally and philosophically far more successfully so than the later ones, like [Jean Jacques-Beineix's] Diva, which drew a wider public.'
The actor-director John Turturro remade it in 2019 as The Jesus Rolls. When Turturro sought permission to make the main characters middle-aged, Blier told him: 'OK, as long as they're stupid.'
Depardieu was loyal to the last, starring in some of Blier's less popular later films, including Les Acteurs (2000), in which he and performers including Jean-Paul Belmondo and Michel Piccoli played exaggerated, vain or ill-tempered versions of themselves, and Heavy Duty (2019), a meta-comedy about two men whose lives have been scripted in advance.
He was also in Blier's last great film, Merci La Vie (1991), which began as an attempt to reproduce Les Valseuses for a new generation. This time, the outlaws were female and played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Blier's then-partner Anouk Grinberg. The movie switched between colour and monochrome, while the plot involved time travel and equated fascism with Aids. A planned appearance by Bob Dylan failed to materialise when the producers became bogged down in negotiations with the singer's lawyers.
Blier intended Merci La Vie to show cinema being 'taken by the throat and given a shaking'. Depardieu, who played a doctor exploiting the spread of Aids, called it 'a punch in the stomach of society'.
The director was born in Paris, to Gisèle (nee Brunet), a former pianist, and Bernard Blier, an actor who was in the middle of shooting Marcel Carné's Le Jour se Lève when his son was born. He described himself as a sensitive child, often cowed by his father's volatility; it was said that Bernard had once punched a fellow cinemagoer who was jeering at a screening of Jean Renoir's La Règle du Jeu.
The family home was filled with actors. 'All the French postwar theatre and cinema stars I met as a child were extremely entertaining,' Blier recalled. 'They laughed a lot, went to each other's houses and stayed up all night drinking. There were the days of Pierre Brasseur, Louis Jouvet, Jean Gabin. Huge, huge talents … There was a kind of collective conviviality which does not really exist any more.'
He decided to become a film-maker after meeting his father's friend Henri-Georges Clouzot, director of Les Diaboliques and The Wages of Fear, at the age of 16. After working as an assistant director, Blier made his directing debut in 1963 with Hitler, Connais Pas (Hitler, Never Heard of Him), a documentary portrait of modern French teenagers. He followed this with Si J'Étais un Espion (1966), a thriller starring his father as an innocent doctor caught up in espionage.
Blier also cast his father in the twisted noir comedy Buffet Froid (1979), which starred Depardieu. And there is a discreetly magical moment at the end of Les Acteurs, during which Blier, appearing as himself, is shown shooting a scene that is then ruined when a mobile phone starts ringing. 'It's for you,' someone says, handing it to the director. Speaking into the device, Blier says: 'Hello Papa'. In fact, his father had died a decade earlier. The scene suggests that cinema can bestow immortality.
After the relative failure of his first two films, Blier wrote the novel on which Les Valseuses would later be based. The director went for shock value again in Calmos (AKA Femmes Fatales, 1976), in which a gynaecologist joins an army to fight women. The film ends with him seeking sanctuary in a giant vagina.
Outrageous material could be offset by a surprisingly sober or even gentle approach. This was the case in Beau-Père (1981), in which an adolescent girl asks her stepfather to be her first lover. La Femme de Mon Pote (My Best Friend's Girl, 1983) featured Huppert in a ménage-à-trois comedy set in a Swiss ski resort. Alain Delon and Nathalie Baye starred in Notre Histoire (1984), which, with its stories nestling, Russian-doll-like, within other stories, found Blier at his most Buñuelian.
Mon Homme (1996), about a sex worker who becomes obsessed with an unhoused, penniless stranger whom she encourages to become her pimp, was greeted with puzzlement, weariness and more accusations of misogyny. Reflecting on the final line ('Women, forgive me'), Blier told the Guardian: 'All men should apologise to women for what they have done to them.'
In 2022, he published the autobiographical novel Fragile des Bronches, which fictionalised scenes from his life.
Blier despised cliche and aestheticism, and sought instead 'to raise the level of debate with the public. And to make films which are original, even if they might be difficult. I often finish writing and think: 'That's it. I've done it now. That's the end of my career. This will clear the cinemas.' And sometimes I've been right.'
The frisson between his inner and outer selves lasted his entire career. 'I look like – I am – an entirely respectable citizen. But I have never stopped thinking of the other life that I could have had, on the road, smashing things up.'
He is survived by his third wife, Farida Rahouadj, who starred in Heavy Duty, and their daughter, Leïla, as well as by two other children, Béatrice and Léonard, from earlier relationships.
Bertrand Blier, film director, born 14 March 1939; died 20 January 2025