Bertrand Blair, the celebrated director whose films scandalized, captivated and entertained France in the 1970s and 1980s with their sometimes brutal projections of French men’s sexual fantasies, died Monday at his home in Paris. He was 85 years old.
His death was confirmed by his son, Leonard Pellet.
For two decades, Mr. Blier has been one of France’s most decorated directors, winning the top prize at Cannes, the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, for his film. “Get your tissues out.” Released in 1978, several films feature the César, the French equivalent of the Oscar.
In a statement issued after his death, President Emmanuel Macron saluted Mr. Blier as “a giant of French cinema, who marked our national imagination for five decades with his free and acerbic touch.”
Mr. Blair launched the careers of men and women who dominated the French screen for decades, including Gérard Depardieu, with whom he directed nine films. One of Mr. Blier’s last public acts was to join others in the French film community to defend Mr. Depardieu in 2023 against accusations of sexual harassment and assault against the actor. (Macron also defended Mr. Depardieu, who now faces criminal charges and a trial in March.)
Mr. Bleier’s legacy is in dispute for the same reasons as Mr. Depardieu’s. His most famous films, especially his 1974 hit, “Les Valseuses” (“Going Places”), starring Mr. Depardieu, are full of misogyny and depictions of women as sexual objects. Described as a black comedy – “Going Places” – a colloquial French title meaning “testicles” – was a massive box office success upon its release, attracting an audience of around six million.
The film depicts an aspect of the French male fantasy, and French culture, that sees women as bodies that exist to satisfy men’s needs.
“Going Places” is a buddy-buddy road movie rampage about rape, sexual assault and an accidental robbery committed by two criminals against a bleak backdrop of empty working-class suburbs and abandoned beach towns. But it’s also coated in a layer of incongruous lightness, enhanced by the exhilarating music of violinist and jazz composer Stephane Grappelli.
Some critics viewed the film as a well-aimed kick at the effusive materialism of post-war bourgeois France. In 1978, Pauline Kael, writing in The New Yorker, called it “a thrilling and deeply funny farce—a celebration and satire of men’s daydreams.” She described it as “blatantly funny”.
Not everyone was amused. Demonstrations took place in front of some of the cinemas where the film was shown, and Le Figaro newspaper demanded that it be banned. One particularly nasty scene shows the two friends sexually assaulting a nursing mother, played by Brigitte Fossey, in an empty train car.
She was invited to a French television program last March, and Ms. Fauci refused to watch the scene again. The film’s heroine, French actress Miu Miu, described the filming as “humiliating.”
The film has been discussed up to the present. French television has gone back and forth about whether “Les Valseuses” can still be shown, as has been the case for many years; One show scheduled for last year was cancelled, and another was scheduled to air this year but only late. Returning to the film in 1990 for its theatrical revival, New York Times critic Karen James wrote that the film had an “ugly quality.”
“The two boyfriends played by Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewyer 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 abused by men, the film strongly suggests that ‘all women are whores.’”
None of Mr. Blair’s subsequent films achieved the commercial success of “Les Valseuses,” although a number of them traded on similar themes, albeit in a less brutal manner. In “Get Your Tissues Out,” Depardieu’s character introduces his depressed wife to a stranger, to cheer her up; She ended up sleeping with a 13-year-old. In Beau-Père (1981), a stepfather has an affair with his 14-year-old stepdaughter; In 1981, Times critic Janet Maslin said the case was “presented with nothing less than Nabokov’s intensity,” but that its “exploitative aspect is also minimal,” saying: “Mr. Blair tells this story very gently.
In Too Beautiful for You, which won the Grand Prix at Cannes in 1989, Mr. Depardieu abandons his beautiful wife, played by Carole Bouquet, for his simpler secretary (Josiane Balasco). “Their love-making is frank eroticism, which Mr. Blair records with humor and truth,” Vincent Canby wrote in The Times.
By the early 1990s, Mr. Blair had largely stopped making successful films; It seems time has passed him by. In a retrospective broadcast on France Culture radio this week, critic Yale Sadat in the journal Notebooks of Cinema pointed out what he called the “paradox” in Mr. Blier’s career.
“He turned French society upside down and captured the spirit of the 1970s,” he said in an interview on the channel. But Sadat added: “Since then, he has become a relic of the era, as if he was trapped by the period he depicted so well.”
Mr Blair himself has denied being a misogynist. In an interview with French television personality Thierry Ardisson, he said: “The stupidest fools in my films are always men.” In response to the suggestion that he was preoccupied with sex, he replied: “What else do you want to talk about?” Sports? There is death, sex and women.”
In 2010, he told France Culture: “I like losers and losers,” suggesting that successful people are bored with him. “In cinema, there is a need for a certain kind of violence,” he said.
Bertrand Blair was born on March 14, 1939, in the Paris suburb of Boulogne-Billancourt, the son of Bernard Blair, a famous actor in French cinema, and Gisèle (Brunet) Blair, who was a pianist. Bertrand never obtained a baccalaureate, the ubiquitous French high school diploma, nor did he go to university. He learned his craft by hanging out with his father’s actor friends, and, at the age of 20, became an assistant on the sets of famous French directors’ films.
His first film was a documentary called “Hitler, connais pas” (1963) – which roughly translates to “Hitler, I’ve Never Heard of Him” – a series of interviews with his peers describing the hopes and aspirations of post-war France. He then went on to direct his tempestuous father — “the most important man in my life,” he told an interviewer, “handsome and seductive, and very funny” — in the 1967 feature film “If I Were a Spy.” But he turned to writing fiction in the early 1970s when it seemed that cinema was not in his favour.
That novel was the basis for “Going Places,” in which Mr. Blair discovered from minor roles yet the duo, Mr. Depardieu and Mr. DeWerre, who were to accompany him for much of the next decade. (Mr. DeWer died by suicide in 1982 at the age of 35.)
“What I did with Valseuses — the French title — “was vile in its crudeness,” he once said in an interview on Ciné+ television. “And I like that bad side of things.”
Of Mr. Depardieu, he said on France Culture in 2010: “We were created to work together.”
Mr. Blair left behind his third wife, actress Farida Rahwaj. two daughters, Leila and Beatrice Pellet; Leonard’s son. Sister Bridget Blair. And one grandchild.
“He was never an intellectual director,” critic Sadat said in statements to France Culture this week. “He was above all sensual and funny.”
Susan C. Beachy, Daphne Angeles and Catherine Porter Contributed to research.