BERTRAND BLIER
(14 March 1939 - 20 January 2025)
The French film director and writer Bertrand Blier, who has died at the age of 85, often wanted to shock his audiences by making them sit up and question his theories. Throughout his sixty-year career he wrote and directed some twenty features and penned screenplays for other directors. He won an Oscar, many Césars and festival awards at Cannes, Venice, Stockholm, Moscow, etc.
Blier was born in Boulogne-Billancourt to the actor Bernard Blier and the pianist Gisele Brunet. The family was host to famous French actors of the time, a rowdy lot who drank all night. Bertrand followed his father by deciding he wanted to make films. He began as an assistant director on minor films such as The Virgin of Nuremberg, an Italian horror flick. His first film as director was the documentary Hitler, connais pas (1963) which won an award at Locarno.
His first feature as writer-director was If I Were a Spy (1966), a thriller with his father in a story about a doctor treating a patient wanted by the Mafia. In 1974 he began his working relationship with the actor Gérard Depardieu in Les Valseuses (aka Going Places), a comedy-drama based on Blier’s novel The Waltzers, French slang for testicles. It was shocking in its vulgarity, nudity and sex scenes. In 1978 he made one of his most successful and shocking films, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, about a ménage à trois between two men and a woman who has depression. The men share the woman in an effort to get her pregnant (but fail). Depardieu starred with Patrick Dewaere and Carole Laure. The film won an Oscar for best foreign film and had many other nominations. Depardieu reappeared in Buffet Froid along with Carole Bouquet, Jean Carmet and Blier’s father. A black crime comedy about a bloodstained knife, it won a César for its script.
Beau Pere was from Blier’s novel about a pianist who has an affair with his stepdaughter (aged 14). Controversial or what? Then, again on the subject of a ménage à trois, My Best Friend’s Girl (1983) has Pascal, a hunky sports shop owner ask his best friend Micky, an unattractive DJ, to look after his latest girlfriend, while he’s at work. The girl seduces the DJ and the upshot is that both men have to compete for the girl’s favours. It starred Thierry Lhermitte, Coluche and Isabelle Huppert. More shock tactics and sex featured in Our Story in which Alain Delon makes love on a train to Nathalie Baye and follows her to a hotel for further action. Both are married with families... and the film gets shockingly worse. Blier’s screenplay won a César. Depardieu returned for Tenue de soiree (aka Evening Dress) to play an ex-con who persuades a married couple (Michel Blanc and Mou-Mou) to join him in his life of burglary. To avoid capture the two men put on drag and pose as prostitutes. The sexual themes continued with Too Beautiful for You in which Depardieu is a car dealer with a gorgeous wife, but who cheats on her with his plain Jane office temp. The film gained many awards, too. Merci la vie (1991) has a schoolgirl (Charlotte Gainsbourg) and a sexy older woman (Anouk Grinberg) going all out to pick up men for trade.
Blier continued making films until 2019, including Les acteurs in which several performers tell their own stories including those of Pierre Arditti, Claude Rich, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Claude Brasseur, Jean-Claude Brialy, Alain Delon, Depardieu, Michel Piccoli and Blier himself. There was also a similar film, All About Actresses, with Julie Depardieu, Charlotte Rampling and Karole Rocher, among others and, of course, Blier too. Bertrand Blier was married three times: first to Françoise Vergnaud from 1959 to 1962; then to the producer Catherine Florin from 1973 to 1999; and finally to the actress Farida Rahouadj. He also had a son by the actress Anouk Grinberg.
MICHAEL DARVELL