Bertrand Blier, the French film director with a long history of provocative offerings including Les Valseuses (Going Places), Tenue de Soirée (Evening Dress) and Trop Belle Pour Toi (Too Beautiful for You), has died aged 85. His son, Leonard, told AFP that the film-maker “died peacefully at home Monday night in Paris, surrounded by his wife and children”.
Blier achieved his greatest successes in the 70s and 80s with a series of outrage-baiting films, many featuring Gérard Depardieu, which concentrated on exposing wounded male machismo. In 2011 he told the Guardian: “I’ve always enjoyed shocking the bourgeois. I know I make buddy movies, but what intrigues me again and again is how male friendships are relatively unproblematic, and yet when men approach what they passionately desire, then their problems begin.”
Born in 1939 in Paris, Blier was the son of Bernard Blier, a prolific character actor in post-war French cinema, who, Blier said, “taught me everything”, and who starred in Blier’s feature-film debut, If I Were a Spy, released in 1967. However, it was Les Valseuses – crude French slang for “testicles” – that established Blier’s reputation as a bourgeois-shocker, as well as that of Depardieu, in his first leading role, with its story of a two delinquents on the run. Containing incidents of rape and sexual assault, it would go on to acquire cult status but in more recent years become the subject of much disapproval.
In 1978 Blier released Préparez Vos Mouchoirs (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs), again featuring Depardieu, which won the best foreign-language film Oscar for another outrage-baiting tale, this time about a woman who becomes pregnant by a 13-year-old boy. After 1979’s Buffet Froid, a surreal thriller again starring Depardieu, Blier then made Beau Pere, about a man who has an affair with his 14-year-old stepdaughter. In Tenue de Soirée in 1986, Depardieu donned drag as a gay petty criminal involved in a ménage à trois.
Blier’s most consequential success, however, is most probably his 1989 release Trop Belle Pour Toi, which won the second prize at the Cannes film festival and five César awards, France’s equivalent to the Oscars. Once again featuring Depardieu, it is the story of a businessman who is bored with his glamorous wife (played by Carole Bouquet) and falls for a dowdy secretary (Josiane Balasko).
Blier followed it up with Merci La Vie in 1991, featuring Charlotte Gainsbourg as a girl experiencing sexual initiation, but the director’s stock began to fall rapidly in the 1990s as audiences lost interest in themes exploring overt sexuality. While he remained a festival fixture in subsequent decades with titles such as Mon Homme (My Man) in 1996, Les Acteurs (Actors) in 2000 and Le Bruit des Glaçons (The Clink of Ice) in 2010, none had anything like the impact of his earlier work. His final film, Convoi Exceptionnel (Heavy Duty), inevitably starred Depardieu and was released in 2019.
Blier was married three times, and had a relationship with Merci La Vie co-star Anouk Grinberg, with whom he had a child.
