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).

Éric Rohmer | La Collectionneuse (The Collector) / 1967

someone to preen to

by Douglas Messerli

 

Patrick Bauchau, Haydée Politoff, Daniel Pommereulle, and Éric Rohmer (screenplay), Éric Rohmer (director) La Collectionneuse (The Collector) / 1967

 

Éric Rohmer’s La Collectionneuse, the 4th of his “Six Moral Tales” (it was the 3rd of the series made, however) is perhaps one of the most revealing concerning Rohmer’s major concerns in these works and aspects of his own life.

      Although the two males of this tale, Adrien (Patrick Bauchau) and Daniel (Daniel Pommereulle) might like to think of themselves as the moral centers of their world, particularly when compared to their accidental house-mate, Haydée (Haydée Politoff)—an attractive but apparently empty-headed young girl who each night brings home another young man to have sex—in the mansion they have borrowed from their friend Rodolphe primarily to evade working and to live out the summer in conditions of intellectual non-existence.

      True, these two friends consider themselves as total intellects—the beautiful Adrien wants to begin an Asian art gallery and the fair-haired Daniel is described by Adrien as a conceptual artist—they are both truly somewhat empty-headed drifters, whose major abilities seem to be in entertaining or even preening themselves for those around them more than accomplishing anything. Indeed, Rohmer evidently selected these two unknown “actors” primarily because they lived the dandyish lives of his own characters. After hours of conversation with the three major actors, Rohmer credited them as co-authors.

      If Haydée is, in fact, a “sexual slut” as they later describe her to her face, or, as they and the film’s title describes her, a female “collector” of men, Adrien himself, as a would-be art dealer, is himself a collector of meaningless objects (particularly since he seems to have little knowledge of history or art except what he has been told), just as Daniel is a collector of art ideas which he never truly realizes except in small maquettes, in one of which the walls of a spherical form are protected with razor blades, a metaphor that surely applies to his and Adrien’s own lives as they spin into space.

       They need Haydée to demonstrate their prowess more than she, who will sleep with nearly anyone who looks good, needs them. Yet she allows them to basically imprison her in the mansion, refusing to help take her to her various rendezvous or to allow her young men to enter their shared domain.

      Together, they mock her and attempt to psychologically torture her, Adrien by pretending to be disinterested in her physicality and Daniel by taking advantage of it, making love to her before turning rather violently against her and ultimately leaving the would be “paradise.”

       The self-enchanted Adrien, constantly fidgeting with his hair and presenting himself in various forms of half-nakedness, is perhaps the worst, simply because he is so self-centered that he sees himself as the focus of the young girl’s attentions as well, imagining that she has some elaborate plan to seduce him. In the end, it is he who attempts to seduce her, without much success.

 

       Having refused any of her previous advances, when Adrien makes his move she rejects him—which he believes is merely another move to reel him in. The delusion of these macho-fools should truly be the subject of the movie, but since Haydée, herself, is so mindless and purposely self-destructive, it is hard to side with the misunderstood female as well.

       Fixing her up with his possible backer of the gallery, Sam (Seymour Hetzberg), Adrien is even a bit disappointed when she reports that she only shared a boat ride and a pleasant dinner. In short, he has played pimp to the young woman, a role for which she joyfully punishes him by destroying his priceless Chinese vase, and probably, by that act, nixing any hopes that Sam may continue to support Adrien’s future gallery.

       Finally admitting Haydée’s sexual prowess, Adrien attempts to drive off with her into a sort of romantic sunset; yet she soon encounters friends traveling in the opposite direction, and just as quickly abandons Adrien to travel back the way she has come.

      The slightly chastised Adrien flies off to London where his girlfriend, Mijanou (Mijanou Bardot, Brigitte’s sister) appearing only in the film’s first prologues, has gone, catching the first plane to join her. But we can only suppose, given what we’ve seen of his views of women, that he probably will also fail at that relationship as well.

      We might deduce, accordingly, that the true moral of this story is simply that Adrien should not have left the woman who was best for him in the first place, a story, as are most of the “Six Moral Tales,” about comeuppance. However, as Maura Edmond, in her 2017 review of the work in Senses of Cinema reminds us, Rohmer was himself a kind of dual person, hiding under the identity of a highly religious family man, Maurice Henri Joseph Schérer, who worked as a classic’s teacher, while actually spending his life (unknown even to his mother) as the famed filmmaker, who hung out with just such Paris starlets and self-enchanted young men.

      In a sense, accordingly, the “morality,” if there truly is any, of this tale turns inward, into a kind of self-observation that uses the director’s “real” lost figures as symbols. In short, there is a kind of self-revelatory dishonesty, that Adrien reflects, in this, one of Rohmer’s best films.

 

Los Angeles, August 3, 2018

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2018).

Spike Lee | She's Gotta Have It / 1968

seeking independence

by Douglas Messerli

 

Spike Lee (writer and director) She’s Gotta Have It / 1968

 

In Spike Lee’s first feature film, shot on the near impossibly small budge of 175,000, is a charming film about a black woman’s self-empowerment in a world in which the men have always had the upper hand with it comes to multi-sexual relationships.

 

    Despite that powerful theme, however, Lee’s film does not preach to us, but simply allows the woman, in this case the remarkably intelligent and beautiful Nola Darling (Tracy Camilla Johns) to tell her own story and present the trio (or would-be quartet, which includes Opal Gilstrap [Raye Dowell]) of sexual encounters she has with three men, who all desire her, and one lesbian friend, who would love to get her into bed.

      Each one of them would truly like to possess Nola and make her their own love object, but the smart designer, artist keeps them all at arms’ length by making her apartment a kind of turnstile in which the men and woman observe each other coming and going at all times.

      Anyone, it appears, is welcome—as long as you have some special personality trait that Nola enjoys.

       Jamie Oversteet (Tommy Redmond Hicks) is an equally intelligent gentle lover who is perhaps best suited to Nola’s own personality, but even he is kept at a distance.

       The least suitable is Greer Childs (John Canada Terrell), a successful, if self-centered model who has become fairly wealthy. He takes Nola into a world of fine dining and other areas of culture which she clearly enjoys.

   

       Mars Blackmon (Spike Lee) is a kind of idiot motor mouth, but he’s funny and makes Nola laugh in way only she can.

       That’s the story, folks, and the details hardly matter. Yet, unlike any white-directed films of the time, when blacks were nearly always portrayed as drug addicts or criminals of various sorts, these citizens of the Fort Greene, Brooklyn area, are all healthy, normal beings with their own desires and achievements—a truly refreshing change in the portrayal of the black community. Even the doctor (S. Epatha Merkerson) who Nola visits when she is told that she has nymphomaniac tendences, pronounces Nola’s sex life as normal and healthy.

       What the lovers of this story resent is that she has not given all her love to one of them. Even though Nola tries to bring peace to her entourage, by inviting them to her place for Thanksgiving dinner, they fight, destroying any good that might have come out of the celebration.

       As Nola makes clear in direct statements before the camera, that is what her life is: a kind of celebration of womanhood, of a woman who does not want to be tied down to one man.

       Even after she dismisses Mars and Greer (the latter of who insists that for Nola the three of them acted together as a kind of machine of 3 penises and 6 arms), choosing Jamie to be her companion, the relationship does not last long.

 

      For she refuses to be tied down to one man. The “she’s gotta to have it” of the title is not as much about sex as it is about the independence Nola continually seeks. Yes, she loves sex, but it is the friendships with her lovers that she most cherishes, the special things she discovers in each of them. And, in that sense, particularly in 1986 when this movie was first released, that was a radical act. For any woman to declare that she wanted sex without any of the strings attached was seldom permitted.

      And that is why Lee’s rather modest film is so very fulfilling. It is the woman in control here, not the men who surround and would fold her into their singular lives.

        In that sense Nola is special, but in Lee’s telling she is also an everywoman who seeks to define her own role in society in which she lives. Nola, I would suspect, also knows that women have always been some of the strongest forces in black communities, often defining themselves as a moral compass to their men. Whether this is a myth or not, it does appear again and again in the most objective of literary and cinematic works about blacks.

     You can call her a freak, a nymphomaniac, whatever…. But she is still a force to be reckoned with.

 

Los Angeles, June 13, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (June 2020).

 

 

Billy Woodberry | Bless Their Little Hearts / 1984

the difference between work and a job

by Douglas Messerli

 

Charles Burnett (scenario and screenplay), Billy Woodberry (director) Bless Their Little Hearts / 1984

 

Billy Woodberry’s excellent film Bless Their Little Hearts is part of the L.A. Rebellion, film scholar Clyde Taylor’s moniker for the group of black UCLA film students who, influenced more by international cinema than by Hollywood pictures, focused their works on the Los Angeles black world, particularly South LA, framing their works on the family and their friends, and expressing these portraits in a slow observation of their everyday acts.

  

      The eldest of these rebels was Charles Burnett, whose Killer of Sheep leaped to the screen in 1978, starting a revolution that also included Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust), and others.

      Burnett served as the screenplay writer and cinematographer of Woodberry’s work as well.

    When using the word “leap,” however, I do not mean to suggest that these films became immediately popular, but rather am suggesting the impact they had on serious filmgoers of the time and years later, such as myself. In fact, these films have, until recently, been shown very seldomly at special film spaces such as New York’s Film Forum, occasional film festivals, and recently on DVD.

     I saw Burnett’s Killer of Sheep at Film Forum in 2007, just before it was released on DVD, and Woodberry’s film was just recently released by Milestone Films, and is now available on the Criterion film-streaming channel. Both Burnett’s and Woodberry’s film have now been included in The National Film Registry, Bless Their Little Hearts in 2013.

    Yet, none of these remarkable films have received the national or international attention they deserve, and although even the august magazine The New Yorker in a Richard Brody feature on both Burnett’s film and Woodberry’s in 2017, none of the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers has received the attention it deserves.

      Whereas Burnett’s family have two children who run wild with other neighborhood kids, punishing and sometimes brutalizing one another the way the society has done to their fathers and mothers, Woodberry’s Charlie (Nate Hardman) and Andais Banks (Kaycee Moore) have three children who are far strictly attended to, particularly by their mother, who, since she herself since as she repeats throughout the film, she is “tired,” incredibly tired, involves something close to hard labor.

      All her children, her two daughters and her young son (performed by Burnett’s own children) are asked to scrub down the walls of their somewhat ramshackle house, as well as to sweep up its floors. The eldest of Andais’ young girls is expected to cook dinner for her siblings and parents each night. If these children, at least, are not jumping from roof to roof or gathering for warfare on barren empty lots, they are, a bit like hired servants, put to work for the family’s survival.

      In one painful scene—which in today’s more gender fluid world might hint at other meanings—their son, Ronnie (generally referred to simply as “Boy”) is sternly lectured by his father for having long nails, ordering up a clipper as he trims them while insisting “long nails are not for men, but for little girls, and sissies. You’re not a sissy are you?” We never know whether Ronnie’s tears are out of embarrassment for his father’s stern correction of his behavior or his sense of loss of a bodily extension of which he is proud.

      The problem central to this household is Charlie’s inability not only to find a job, but his inability, even from piecework jobs, to bring home enough money to help support the children and wife he loves. In short, he, himself, has not been able to match the conception his has of what it is to be a man.

    The film begins, in fact, with Charlie in a government jobs office, where he slowly fills in an application form with his name, yet seems quickly distracted by placards that celebrate more temporary jobs. As Andais later proclaims, he is a man made of pip-dreams, who for 10 years or more has promised to find a good job for himself without any result.

    Sexual relationships between husband and wife have long vanished, as each evening Charlie attempts to hold his tired and disinterred wife before turning toward the wall in the other direction from her body.

     Later, reencountering a woman friend his has known from years before, he spends time with her despite the fact that she is married with children of her own, offering up $90.00 of his paltry $25.00-a-day take-home pay, an amount which might have paid for at least one household bill.

    At the end of her tether, Andais finally accuses him of having taken up with a woman with cheap perfume—she has smelled it on his body each night for weeks—as the two vent their frustrations and anger at one another for over ten minutes of film time.

    As Brody writes: “The showdown that results—a ten-minute take in the kitchen, in which she unleashes her fury at Charlie and they both unleash a seemingly pent-up lifetime of disappointments and frustrations—is one of the great domestic cataclysms of modern movies, worthy of a place alongside the films of the same era by John Cassavetes.”

     After their battle royal, Charlie has no choice, given his wounded dignity, but to spend the night with a friend, after briefly visiting his barber, who obviously is used to proffering advice to his clients. He argues against Charlie’s insistence that he is just looking for work; a job, suggests that he has to be able to convince someone that he has a special talent to accomplish that job.

     Although, Charlie is clearly a hard worker, he has never even pondered the idea that the ability to work is not the same as seeking out some kind of employment for which he is best suited.

    Unlike most Hollywood films, Woodberry’s film does not offer a simple answer to Charlie’s desperate search to match his talents with the capitalist system. It is more than painful to watch him desperately seeking something from his past from an overcrowded closet: his fishing rod and tackle box. The next day he visits the river, reeling in a catfish or two, and with other friends, opens up a small fish stand out of the back of one of their cars.

      The others clownishly play the hustlers, attempting to steer in traffic and walk-by customers. They do actually succeed in a few sales.

       But waiting in the car and watching their near fruitless attempts netting only a few dollars, Charlie finally trudges away while the others attempt to call him back. The last scenes we see of our sad hero are of him marching into the horizon, his back to us, having come clearly to realize that even what he knows best how-to-do means little in the world in which he lives.

     If no other reason than Moore’s brilliant acting—she played the wife as well in Burnett’s Killer—this movie ought to be on everyone’s list to watch. And then there is also the tear-rending painful story that this picture conveys. We cannot even imagine who in this film is asking to “Bless Their Little Hearts,” or even if the film is referring to Charlie and Andais’ offspring or to them as well. But we can only imagine that by the time they grow of age, their children's’ hearts will have hardened with that blessing having turned into an ironic cliché. For no one, given the racial disparities these South L.A. people have to suffer, can ever be truly blessed.

 

Los Angeles, July 6, 2020

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2020).