Bertrand Blier | Les Valseuses (Going Places) / 1974

the couple

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bertrand Blier and Philippe Dumarçay (screenplay, based on the novel by Blier), Bertrand Blier (director) Les Valseuses (Going Places) / 1974

 

Upon its original release in 1974, Bertrand Blier’s Les Valseuses (Going Places), based on Blier’s own novel, was perhaps one of the most controversial films of its day. Vulgar, sexually explicit, and featuring rape, physical abuse, and suicide, among other things it must have seemed in 1974 as crude and ballsy as its French meaning, “the testicles.”   

     Vincent Canby of The New York Times was more perceptive that he often was, describing its two central characters as being “pursued, doomed like that mythical bird Tennessee Williams sometimes writes about, the one that must spend its entire life flying, since evolution has denied it landing gear.” But like so many other US reviewers of the day, he also found it to be “a movie whose good performances and technical expertise can never disguise the vacuity of its assumed nihilism, which bears about as much relation to the real thing as fashion photography does to the work of Cartier-Bresson.” He concluded: “I must say that though I thought parts of it funny, and Miss Moreau riveting, the net effect was one of irritation and gloom. It's not very invigorating to see so much talent squandered on such foolish mixed-up romanticism.”

       By its re-release in 1990, Kevin Thomas of the Los Angeles Times proclaimed that none of Blier’s later “notable and distinctive” films “have packed the punch of his debut film…. The road/buddy movie was scarcely new 16 year ago, but Blier’s strategies in the telling of his sexual odyssey remain fresh, outrageous and inspired.”

    Although even in 1990 a critic as august as Roger Ebert still didn’t get it, declaring “Going Places is a film of truly cynical decadence. It’s also, not incidentally, the most misogynistic movie I can remember; its hatred of women is palpable and embarrassing.”

    Seeing it the other day, I was wowed by its originality, its fresh sense of camp and imitation, and its utter cinematic charm.

 

   What Canby and later Ebert didn’t comprehend is that that the film’s two appealing and even charming central figures, Jean-Claude and Pierrot, played wonderfully by Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, are a non-realist Beckettian duo the likes of Mercier and Camier (and before that Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Péchuchet), clowns who cannot exist without one another, and who, although always seeking sex with females are more in love with one another than they might possibly be able to even imagine with the opposite sex. And no married couple spends as much time together as do these two men.

    In fact, at one point in Blier’s film when they have escaped to a beach city out of season with no female in sight (nor anyone else for that matter), they readily have sex with one another. To describe them as gay is beside the point, and such figures would surely rankle at such a description since their stock role in movies demands they seek out the opposite sex. Yet they can only exist as a pair, doing everything together, including enjoying sex with females who they simply see as machines for their pleasure; they haven’t a clue how to really love. These are, after all, puppets, cute rag dolls who troll the countryside for pleasure.

    But pleasure for such figures is more difficult to find than a good man—or woman, since that’s what they imagine they are seeking. Besides, whatever they do, they are punished. Described as petty criminals, their first crime was simply stealing from a five-and-dime store, much like the characters in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s. But since even such petty crimes turn them automatically into criminals, they obviously feel they might as well go whole hog, forever after actually robbing their way through the film, first an older woman on her way home who turns out to have hardly any money in her purse; then a beauty parlor where a woman they have also stolen, Marie-Ange (Miou-Miou) works; and finally from a wretched couple with a beautiful young daughter, Jacqueline (Isabelle Huppert in one of her earliest roles), who actually suggests the heist as she runs off with them.

 

     They also begin by borrowing a Citroën DS for a joyride. But when they attempt to return it, the owner points a gun at them and threatens to turn them into the police. As Pierrot attempts to run, the owner of the car shoots him in the balls, Jean-Claude overpowering the shooter stealing the gun, car, and the man’s date, Marie-Ange, who is just as happy to go with them than she is with the man, her boss, who treats her perhaps even worse than our two clowns will, even though they leave her in the care of a mechanic who rapes her and later slap her about on several occasions, at one point tie her up and leave her after they rob the beauty parlor, and later toss her a couple of times into a watery canal. She too is simply a doll, a Punch and Judy-like character who sustains the slings and arrows, or in this case, blows and slugs in which the threesome engage.

       Meanwhile, to find care for Pierrot, Jean-Claude threatens a doctor and his wife, forcing the doctor by gunpoint to provide fix up Pierrot. Once the bandages are in place, they steal the doctor’s money and run. Fortunately, Pierrot’s wound is only superficial, but he fears for the worst when he cannot get an erection. But soon he’s back in action.   

       The robbery of other cars (and even bicycles) follows, mostly just to exchange vehicles so they won’t be identified, but often they have no other way to get from place to place— although a wonderful train ride ends in Pierrot sucking from one tit of a nursing mother, while Jean-Claude titillates the other with his finger in scandalous scene that probably wouldn’t be permitted except in a porno film today.

 

     In this topsy-turvy world, however, the women almost all seem to take great pleasure in the company of these extraordinary misogynists. The woman on the train (Brigitte Fossey), about to meet up with her nerdy husband, is most certainly sent into a sexual spin by their adulation of her breasts. And despite their treatment of Marie-Ange, she is only too ready to join them, as they live on their money from beauty parlor heist, in some of the few moments they have of true rest and relaxation in the country, dining on good bread, meat, and wine.

 

        At another point, believing that perhaps a woman just released from the prison may be the most desperate for sex, they pick up Jean Pirolle (played by the wonderful Jeanne Moreau), who indeed is perfectly happy to join the couple in bed—although in the case, after sex she steals away to shoot kill herself with their gun. Her reasons seem inexplicable, but they perhaps relate to the fact of the reason she has been imprisoned (which I will discuss momentarily), not because of having had sex with them.

         And, as I’ve already suggested, the young Jacqueline is only too ready to escape with our boys in the car stolen from her parents, and even enjoys her first sexual experience with them in tandem.

        In short, Blier’s clowns are stock figures programmed for behavior not only like Beckett’s Mercier and Camier, but like the all those pairs and singles who we’ve already experienced in numerous films before Going Places, Jim Stark and Plato Crawford in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel without a Cause (1955), the young rebel Antoine Doinel and his friend Patrick Auffay in François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows (1959), Michel Poiccard in Jean-Luc Godard’s Breathless (1960), Franz and Arthur in Godard’s Band of Outsiders (1964), Ferdinand Griffon (aka Pierrot) in Godard’s Pierrot le Fou (1965), and, particularly, Jules and Jim who meet up with a young Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) in Truffaut’s 1962 film, to which work is almost a satiric testament.

      If you recall, in that last named film, Catherine, caught between her love for Jules and Jim, runs her car off a broken bridge, killing herself and Jim, while leaving Jules to bury them. But let us pretend she survived in the magical land of motion pictures, being sent off to jail for her crime. 10 years later she is freed as the older Jeanne we witness in this film. She has not had a miscarriage as Jules reports she had in Jules and Jim, but has had a young son, Jacques (Jacques Chailleux), who has also been serving time in prison for criminal activity.

       Certainly, Jeanne (or perhaps the real actor behind her, Jeanne Moreau) does not want yet again to go through the process of splitting up such a perfectly matched pair as the Laurel and Hardy-like couple of this film, Jean-Claude and Pierrot, and destroys herself to prevent it.

       But the fools can’t resist destroying the moment of joy they are now encountering in their country hideaway, and, finding out about the existence of Jacques, they go to the prison to pick up him and take him back to their little commune where, as they tell him, they share everything, including the pleasures of Marie-Ange—although, as they explain to him, while she’s completely open to sex, she’s also rather sexless with no reaction whatsoever, never reaching, apparently, a climax.

        All that changes when the virginal young man approaches her and cums early two times before the third time he succeeds, also presenting her with her first orgasm. From now on, she becomes not just a willing sex-object but a sex-crazed woman, desperate to have sex almost constantly including in the back seat with both of them, one after the other, while the empty-handed one drives on.

          In the meantime, Jacques argues it’s time for another heist, and taking the two fools along with him visits a house in which he says an elderly man is holding a great deal of money. Actually, it’s the home of the prison warden whom he intends to murder; he succeeds, involving our two fools, sending them once again on the run. Newspaper headlines post their pictures. They attempt to rid themselves of Marie-Ange, since they have developed feelings for her and don’t want her involved in case they are caught. But she refuses, and, as I have mentioned above, they collect Jacqueline as well.  

 

        But finally, they put Jacqueline by the side of the highway to hitchhike back to civilization, and by the end of the film the two are once again alone as a couple, “going places,” they suggest. But we know, alas, they have nowhere to go. Rebels without a cause, they are nothing but a type, a team who repeat themselves over and over, stealing cars, fucking women, constantly on the run. If only they were given some money to simply rest for a while, eat, drink, take in the sun, they might figure out that it is one another whom they truly love.

 

Los Angeles, March 17, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema (March 2004).