Movies I’m Watching: Les Valseuses
Friday, 19 September 2008
I actually watched this a couple of weeks ago but never got the chance to write about it: There’s a Channel4.com review which sums it up nicely:
For Blier, the surreal agent provocateur who would make a career out of winding up the bourgeoisie, the film’s male aggression, absurd black humour and absence of any clear moral perspective proved both a calling card and a template. The characters are meagre and obnoxious but there’s something playful about the determination to cause outrage, and Stephan Grapelli’s whimsical score introduces a lyrical undercurrent which events, on their own, can’t muster.Verdict
Blier’s rude and rambling farce occupies a similar position in 1970s French cinema as Trainspotting in 1990s Britain. It’s chaotic and obnoxious, but executed with a fair degree of Gallic swagger.
“Gallic swagger”! Love that phrase.
One can definitely see how, at the time, this movie ruffled some feathers. The sexuality isn’t overly explicit, but the film and the characters are quite frank about their sexual needs.
I don’t have much to say about this film, not that I didn’t enjoy it. I will mention two things that struck me. First, the young Gerard Depardieu. I had never seen a film of his from this far back (1974) — most of the films that I have seen him in are from the 1980s onwards, and probably mostly those from the 1990s and early 2000s. So of course, seeing him
this young, giving what the Channel 4 reviewer calls a “ferociously energetic performance from a rangy young Depardieu”, is a real revelation. And I agree with that description as well, the young Depardieu is just bristling with energy, sexual and otherwise. Even in the very first scene when his character Jean Claude and his friend Pierrot are tormenting a poor bourgeois woman they are going to rob, you can see it in his eyes. This is no actor is lower-class drag, your eyes tell you — this is the real thing. There is something menacing in his eyes, his posture, the way he carries himself. He’s much more the loose cannon than is Pierrot. Maybe he can afford to be, because Pierrot does get shot in the balls in the beginning, and soon Jean Claude becomes his friend/steward (and maybe gay lover?). Jean Claude is clearly the brains of the operation, the one that comes up with the ideas (he’s always saying “I’ve got an idea”), the one that launches them into all these madcap adventures.
You feel that his anger and his hurt is the most real: what is more revealing than the eternal hunt for pussy is the inchoate rage he hurls at rural, suburban France. There is one scene where they are wandering through a remarkably drab town where even the flies seem to be on siesta. It’s a gray, overcast day and they are walking around this ghost town and Jean-Claude says something like “town of shit! This place is such shit” (I don’t remember the line, and I don’t speak French). And then there’s the scene where Marie-Ange, Jean-Claude and Pierrot take the young rebellious teenager (Isabelle Huppert in one of her first roles) and “rescue” her from her stifling bourgeois parents. The Channel 4 reviewer mentions that director Bertrand Blier has made a career out of winding up the bourgeoisie, and I find this interesting, both within the film itself and also in the sense that I wonder why more filmmakers don’t take the piss out of the bourgeoisie more often, that being, after all, the holy and eternal right of angst-ridden young people in developed countries throughout the world.
The other thing worth mentioning is the Jeanne Moreau, the Eternal Feminine of postwar French cinema. There are never enough superlatives in the dictionary for women like that, or should we say that the extant ones are deficient for capturing the essence of what a woman like that is.
Jeanne is just released from prison. They stalk her. Cajole her. Eventually she gives in. Two men and a woman they share… sound familiar? Throughout she’s like a mime; there isn’t much dialogue. She’s just been released from jail. No one knows what she is thinking. Certainly, she wants some delicious food and a side order of young cock. But what lurks behind the guarded smiles?
If you’ve seen the movie, you know: she gets her food, gets her menage-a-trois on, and then shoots herself in the head. It’s a strange episode within the movie, almost self-contained, and few scenes hence, the boys are back on their adventures. They do find her son, but that’s about all that ties the latter part of the film with the Moreau scenes. Maybe I’m just morbid, but I liked this “episode” or a least it stood out above the rest of the film.
Or maybe Jeanne Moreau just has that kind of effect on me!