Bertrand Blier, an acclaimed director whose films scandalized, captivated and entertained 1970s and ’80s France with their sometimes brutal projections of French men’s sexual imaginations, died on Monday at his home in Paris. He was 85.
His death was confirmed by his son Léonard Blier.
For two decades Mr. Blier was one of France’s most decorated directors, winning the grand prize at Cannes, an Academy Award for best foreign film for “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” released in 1978, and numerous Césars, France’s equivalent of the Oscar.
In a statement after his death, President Emmanuel Macron saluted Mr. Blier (pronounced blee-AY) as a “giant of French cinema, who marked our national imagination for five decades with his free, biting touch.”
Mr. Blier launched the careers of men and women who would dominate the French screen for decades, including Gérard Depardieu, with whom he made nine films. One of Mr. Blier’s last public acts was to join others in France’s film community to come to Mr. Depardieu’s 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).
Mr. Blier’s legacy is contested for the same reasons as Mr. Depardieu’s. His better-known films, and especially his breakthrough in 1974, “Les Valseuses” (“Going Places”), starring Mr. Depardieu, are permeated with misogyny and depictions of women as sex objects. Billed as a dark comedy, “Going Places” — the French title is slang for “testicles” — was an enormous box office success on its release, drawing an audience of nearly six million.
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.
“Going Places” 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’s also cloaked in incongruous lightheartedness, enhanced by a jaunty score by the jazz violinist and composer Stephane Grappelli.
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 “an explosively funny erotic farce — both a celebration and a satire of men’s daydreams.” She called it “flagrantly funny.”
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.
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 “humiliating.”
The movie has been debated down to the present. French television has gone back and forth over whether “Les Valseuses” 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 in The New York Times that the film “has an ugly undertone.”
“The two friends played by Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere prey on women in a cruel and contemptuous way,” she wrote, adding that “by creating a stream of women who choose to be seduced and mistreated by the men, the film strongly suggests that all women are whores.”
None of Mr. Blier’s subsequent films equaled the commercial success of “Les Valseuses,” though a number trafficked in similar themes, albeit less brutally. In “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” the Depardieu character offers his depressed wife to a stranger, to make her happy; she winds up sleeping with a 13-year-old. In “Beau-Père” (1981) a stepfather has an affair with his 14-year-old stepdaughter; in 1981, the Times critic Janet Maslin said the affair was “presented with something less than Nabokovian acuity,” but “its exploitative side is also minimal,” saying, “Mr. Blier tells this story very gently.”
In “Too Beautiful for You,” the 1989 Grand Prize winner at Cannes, the plot twist is Mr. Depardieu’s abandonment of his beautiful wife, played by Carole Bouquet, for his much plainer secretary (Josiane Balasko). “Their lovemaking is flat-out eroticism, which Mr. Blier records with steamy humor and truth,” Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.
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 “paradox” of Mr. Blier’s career.
“He turned French society upside down and captured the spirit of the ’70s,” he said in an interview on the channel. But, Mr. Sadat added, “Since 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.”
Mr. Blier himself denied being a misogynist. In an interview with the French television personality Thierry Ardisson, he said, “The dumbest fools in my films are always the guys.” To the suggestion that he was preoccupied with sex, he responded: “What else do you want to talk about? Sports? There is death, sex, women.”
In 2010, he told France Culture: “I like those who are lost, the losers,” suggesting that successful people bored him. “In cinema,” he said, “there’s the need for a certain violence.”
Bertrand Blier was born on March 14, 1939, in 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 never received his baccalauréat, the ubiquitous French secondary school diploma, and did not go to university. He learned his craft by hanging out with his father’s actor friends and becoming, by the age of 20, a hand on the film sets of well-known French directors.
His first film was a documentary, “Hitler, connais pas,” (1963) — roughly translated as “Hitler, never heard of him” — a series of interviews with his peers describing hopes and aspirations in postwar France. He went on to direct his tempestuous father — “the most important man in my life,” he told an interviewer, “handsome and seductive, very funny” — in a 1967 feature film, “If I Were a Spy.” But he turned to writing a novel in the early 1970s as the cinema appeared not to be working out for him.
That novel was the basis for “Going Places,” 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 by suicide in 1982 at 35.)
“What I did with “Valseuses” — the French title — “was ignoble in its crudeness,” he once told an interviewer on the Ciné+ television station. “And I loved that bad-mannered aspect of things.”
About Mr. Depardieu, he said on France Culture in 2010, “We were made to work together.”
Mr. Blier is survived by his third wife, the actress Farida Rahouadj; two daughters, Leïla and Béatrice Blier; a son, Léonard; a sister, Brigitte Blier; and one grandson.
“He was never an intellectual director,” Mr. Sadat, the critic, said on France Culture this week. “He was above all, sensory, and funny.”
Susan C. Beachy, Daphné Anglès and Catherine Porter contributed research.