\n<\/p>\n
Bertrand Blier, an acclaimed director whose films scandalized, captivated and entertained 1970s and \u201980s France with their sometimes brutal projections of French men\u2019s sexual imaginations, died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 85.<\/p>\n
His death was confirmed by his son L\u00e9onard Blier.<\/p>\n
For two decades Mr. Blier was one of France\u2019s most decorated directors, winning the grand prize at Cannes, an Academy Award for best foreign film for \u201cGet Out Your Handkerchiefs,\u201d<\/a> released in 1978, and numerous C\u00e9sars, France\u2019s equivalent of the Oscar.<\/p>\n In a statement after his death, President Emmanuel Macron saluted Mr. Blier (pronounced blee-AY) as a \u201cgiant of French cinema, who marked our national imagination for five decades with his free, biting touch.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Blier launched the careers of men and women who would dominate the French screen for decades, including G\u00e9rard Depardieu, with whom he made nine films. One of Mr. Blier\u2019s last public acts was to join others in France\u2019s film community to come to Mr. Depardieu\u2019s defense in 2023 in the face of sexual harassment and assault accusations against the actor. (Mr. Macron also defended Mr. Depardieu, who now faces criminal charges and a March trial.)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Mr. Blier\u2019s legacy is contested for the same reasons as Mr. Depardieu\u2019s. His better-known films, and especially his breakthrough in 1974, \u201cLes Valseuses\u201d (\u201cGoing Places\u201d), starring Mr. Depardieu, are permeated with misogyny and depictions of women as sex objects. Billed as a dark comedy, \u201cGoing Places\u201d \u2014 the French title is slang for \u201ctesticles\u201d \u2014 was an enormous box office success on its release, drawing an audience of nearly six million.<\/p>\n The film captured an aspect of the French male imagination, and French culture, that sees women as bodies existing to satisfy the needs of men.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n \u201cGoing Places\u201d is a road-and-buddy-movie rampage of rape, sexual assault and casual theft perpetrated by two hoodlums against a grim backdrop of empty working-class suburbs and abandoned beach towns. But it\u2019s also cloaked in incongruous lightheartedness, enhanced by a jaunty score by the jazz violinist and composer Stephane Grappelli<\/a>.<\/p>\n The film was seen by some critics as a well-aimed kick at the stultifying materialism of postwar bourgeois France. In 1978, Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, called it \u201can explosively funny erotic farce \u2014 both a celebration and a satire of men\u2019s daydreams.\u201d She called it \u201cflagrantly funny.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Not everybody was amused. There were demonstrations in front of some movie theaters where it was showing, and the newspaper Le Figaro demanded that it be banned. One particularly nasty scene shows the two buddies sexually assaulting a nursing mother, played by Brigitte Fossey, in an empty train car.<\/p>\n Invited onto a French television program last March, Ms. Fossey refused to watch the scene again. The female lead, the French actress Miou-Miou, called the filming \u201chumiliating.\u201d<\/p>\n The movie has been debated down to the present. French television has gone back and forth over whether \u201cLes Valseuses\u201d can still be shown, as it was for years; one scheduled showing last year was canceled, another was slotted for broadcast this year but only at a late hour. Revisiting the film in 1990 on the occasion of its revival in theaters, the critic Caryn James wrote<\/a> in The New York Times that the film \u201chas an ugly undertone.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe two friends played by Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere prey on women in a cruel and contemptuous way,\u201d she wrote, adding that \u201cby creating a stream of women who choose to be seduced and mistreated by the men, the film strongly suggests that all women are whores.\u201d<\/p>\n None of Mr. Blier\u2019s subsequent films equaled the commercial success of \u201cLes Valseuses,\u201d though a number trafficked in similar themes, albeit less brutally. In \u201cGet Out Your Handkerchiefs,\u201d the Depardieu character offers his depressed wife to a stranger, to make her happy; she winds up sleeping with a 13-year-old. In \u201cBeau-P\u00e8re\u201d (1981) a stepfather has an affair with his 14-year-old stepdaughter; in 1981, the Times critic Janet Maslin said the affair was \u201cpresented with something less than Nabokovian acuity,\u201d but \u201cits exploitative side is also minimal,\u201d saying, \u201cMr. Blier tells this story very gently.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n In \u201cToo Beautiful for You,\u201d the 1989 Grand Prize winner at Cannes, the plot twist is Mr. Depardieu\u2019s abandonment of his beautiful wife, played by Carole Bouquet, for his much plainer secretary (Josiane Balasko). \u201cTheir lovemaking is flat-out eroticism, which Mr. Blier records with steamy humor and truth,\u201d Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n By the early 1990s, Mr. Blier had largely stopped making films that were successful; the times appeared to have passed him by. In a retrospective on the France Culture radio station this week, the Cahiers du Cinema critic Yal Sadat noted what he called the \u201cparadox\u201d of Mr. Blier\u2019s career.<\/p>\n \u201cHe turned French society upside down and captured the spirit of the \u201970s,\u201d he said in an interview on the channel. But, Mr. Sadat added, \u201cSince that time, he has been relegated to being a relic of the era, as though he was trapped by the period that he captured so well.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Blier himself denied being a misogynist. In an interview with the French television personality Thierry Ardisson, he said, \u201cThe dumbest fools in my films are always the guys.\u201d To the suggestion that he was preoccupied with sex, he responded: \u201cWhat else do you want to talk about? Sports? There is death, sex, women.\u201d<\/p>\n In 2010, he told France Culture: \u201cI like those who are lost, the losers,\u201d suggesting that successful people bored him. \u201cIn cinema,\u201d he said, \u201cthere\u2019s the need for a certain violence.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n Bertrand Blier was born on March 14, 1939, in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, the son of Bernard Blier<\/a>, a well-known character actor in French cinema, and Gis\u00e8le (Brunet) Blier, who had been a pianist. Bertrand never received his baccalaur\u00e9at, the ubiquitous French secondary school diploma, and did not go to university. He learned his craft by hanging out with his father\u2019s actor friends and becoming, by the age of 20, a hand on the film sets of well-known French directors.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n His first film was a documentary, \u201cHitler, connais pas,\u201d (1963) \u2014 roughly translated as \u201cHitler, never heard of him\u201d \u2014 a series of interviews with his peers describing hopes and aspirations in postwar France. He went on to direct his tempestuous father \u2014 \u201cthe most important man in my life,\u201d he told an interviewer, \u201chandsome and seductive, very funny\u201d \u2014 in a 1967 feature film, \u201cIf I Were a Spy.\u201d But he turned to writing a novel in the early 1970s as the cinema appeared not to be working out for him.<\/p>\n That novel was the basis for \u201cGoing Places,\u201d for which Mr. Blier unearthed from hitherto minor roles the duo, Mr. Depardieu and Mr. Dewaere, who were to accompany him for much of the next decade. (Mr. Dewaere died<\/a> by suicide in 1982 at 35.)<\/p>\n \u201cWhat I did with \u2018Valseuses\u2019\u201d \u2014 the French title \u2014 \u201cwas ignoble in its crudeness,\u201d he once told an interviewer on the Cin\u00e9+ television station. \u201cAnd I loved that bad-mannered aspect of things.\u201d<\/p>\n About Mr. Depardieu, he said on France Culture in 2010, \u201cWe were made to work together.\u201d<\/p>\n Mr. Blier is survived by his third wife, the actress Farida Rahouadj; two daughters, Le\u00efla and B\u00e9atrice Blier; a son, L\u00e9onard; a sister, Brigitte Blier; and one grandson.<\/p>\n \u201cHe was never an intellectual director,\u201d Mr. Sadat, the critic, said on France Culture this week. \u201cHe was above all, sensory, and funny.\u201d<\/p>\n Susan C. Beachy, Daphn\u00e9 Angl\u00e8s and Catherine Porter contributed research.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n