Saturday, January 3, 2015

Les Valseuses - dir. Bertrand Blier (1974)


Bertrand Blier’s hugely successful Going Places (Les Valseuses, literally 'balls' or 'cojones')
introduced an exciting new director to the world and catapulted Depardieu and Dewaere into the limelight. The first of four collaborations, Blier and Depardieu would teams up for Trop Belle pour Toi, Buffet Froide, and Ménage. Les Valseuses divided American audiences. Which is to say, it succeeded as provocation. While US cinema of the early 70s is mostly remembered for its celebration of violence, French cinema  (films like Claude Mann’s La Meilleure Facon de Marcher, Louis Malle’s Souffle du Coeur, Jaecklin's The Story of O, Schroeder's Maïtresse, etc.) explored the outer boundaries of human sexuality with singular and unblinking directness.  


A buddy comedy with a difference, Les Valseuses emplots the anti-social impulses of two free-wheeling drifters. Following in the footsteps of sundry causeless rebels of modern cinema, regular guys Jean-Claude (Depardieu) and Pierrot (Patrick Dewaere) swoop into frame in a shopping cart in pursuit of a distraught, over manicured bourgeoise. They corner the middle-aged 'square' to the front door of a tenement and lewdly maul her while helping themselves to her pastries. Delighted by her hysteria, their assault on what we are to understand as a deserving target sets the bawdy yet good-naturedly a-moral tone of their misadventures. 

Their offense declares Blier's intention to reclaim the territory of masculine chaos from civilization's effeminized over-refinement. Ironically this makes it a declaration of war on the wave of feminism which returns womankind to a fragile protected class as an oracle of unquestionable moral authority. The eclipse of a male perspective not redefined by feminism's polemical verities precludes any actual dialectic of the sexes

Pierrot and Jean-Claude may be irredeemable fuck-ups, but they are fuck-ups whose agenda has assumed archetypal valence, preserved in the amber of a Zeitgeist four decades old. 


Blier cuts to his anti-heroes being chased through a field by the local contingent of 'epaté-ed' property owners (= 'betrayers of the Revolution'). They escape and heist an automobile, returning after a jaunt about the countryside only to be confronted by its gun-wielding owner in no mood to negotiate. As neighbors gather the wronged man--so "uptight" he wears a tie--makes arrangements to call the police. Gazing up at windows crowded with retributive kill-joys, Jean-Claude muses: “We certainly are in France.” 

His implied distinction between cool and uncool seems rather pat and it's hard to imagine it could have been otherwise even in 1974, a fact that suggests the cultural distance we've traveled since the days when everyone authentically 'contemporary' was a convinced anti-establishment type.

A shot is fired and Pierrot takes off running. The Square is disarmed, Miou-Miou--in pink faux-fur--abducted, as Stephane Grappelli’s jazz violin cues lighthearted irreverence.  



Blier conspires to put us on the side of his dimwits--alternately cheering and cringing at their escapades. The fact that his rebels-for-the-hell-of-it just want to have fun compels us to condone their disinhibition lest we make ourselves guilty of the very unhipness they would pull up by the roots. Almost by accident, their flight from boredom turns ou, to be a journey of self-discovery.

Where Godard’s Pierrot's moral indignation over US involvement in
Vietnam lent a certain authority to his wild ride southwards, Blier’s duo have no cause for which to agitate except the inviolable right to pursue pleasure. Only joyless license remains, trouble-making out of an excess of Unbehagen and élan vital. 

Being treated for the slug in his upper-inner thigh, Pierrot reclines pantless in a gynecological examination chair, his mouth open as he sleeps. In one of a handful of incidents that undermine the might of his 'valseuses,' Blier shows Pierrot's otherwise aggressively randy sexuality as unexpectedly vulnerable. Such playfulness with issues of male sexuality is Blier's redeeming virtue as a director.
 

Miou Miou is left with a portly drug-dealer who complains she's a “dead fuck” who "just spreads her legs and counts the flies." As non-orgasmic, the dopey hairdresser is treated as the ultimate failure by her would-be liberators. 

Before dropping her off they ask if they can touch her ass-hairs, because "touching something dirty brings good luck." She obliges after a brief bout of incredulity, allowing them to rummage under her fur and bringing their fingers up for an inquisitive sniff. Here Blier conquers one more dimension of sexual behavior for mainstream cinema. Somehow it doesn't come across as gratuitously vulgar. Miou Miou seems less disgusted than amused, even honored. It's not everyday one's ass hair confers talismanic power.

Les Valseuses has been called a misogynistic farce, though I find more vulgarity than hatred of the female; an antagonism that goes hand-in-hand with the sexual idealization, individuation dynamics,
and aggressive instrumentalization of the adolescent  male. A general aggressiveness towards all standards of decency is explored in Les Valseuses, including the inhibition induced by the veneration of the mother and all would-be mothers. 

In Lina Wertmüller's Swept Away, the self-degradation of the female lead, willfully submitting to her alpha male tormentor in the crucible of love-as-war, is arguably a more provocative example of aggression towards women. In films that are explicitly about breaking taboos, the taboo against the mistreatment of women should be contextualized by that intention.



The Mother is beautifully embodied by Nordic milk & honey goddess Brigitte Fossey. As she nurses her infant at the back of a train, Jean-Claude and Pierrot, grow enraptured like schoolboys at the sight of the exposed breast fulfilling its natural function. Their staring, oblivious to her discomfort, would be offensive enough, but what next transpires is unheard of in its audacity--the veritable stuff of male fantasy, and female dystopia. As the mother makes to leave, causing the baby to cry, they block her exit, insisting “Baby Jesus” get his fill. Sitting back down, she opens her blouse, and resumes stilling. Pierrot and Jean-Claude reverently take in the transmission of sustenance. She maintains an air of resignation until the job is finished, returning their gazes with her own vacant, almost pitying one. 

“Your tits are hot,” Jean-Claude tells her, in a bit of comedic incongruity. She remains unfazed. Untempted by his offer of money, she hurries off, only to find her way blocked by a bicycle. Jean-Claude proposes the cash be spent on a champagne celebration of her impending reunion with the father of her child. In exchange she must give Pierrot—abandoned by his own mother—to suckle. 

With a certain weariness the Mother consents. The train enters a tunnel. Pierrot kneels before her and unbuttons her blouse as she and Jean-Claude--
in one of the most loaded stand-offs in cinema history --exchange an ambivalent gaze. Far from being misogynistic, the profanation, at once shocking and oddly moving, feels like a clumsy celebration of motherhood. The mother's fearlessness suggests she is less an individual than an archetype.

I would sooner argue that the scene is motivated by misdandry than misogyny, as the men come off as a little more than helpless louts, at the mercy of impulse. The 
painful scene has the enduring fascination of all things genuinely transgressive. In exploring sexual prohibitions rather than taboos of violence, Blier is more subversive than Melville, Friedkin, and Coppolla combined, largely because violence has lost the capacity to shock.


A scene so audacious in an ostensible comedy is unique and explains Les Valseuses' iconoclastic reputation. Blier's irreverence creates an order of the sacred inseparable from acts of profanation.  

While Pierrot nourishes himself the woman grows first tender, then passionate, stroking his hair and embracing him. Blier, cultivates such incongruities, yet doesn't allow us to fix the tender moment. Its heartfelt if shocking eroticism is interrupted when Pierrot complains he's not “getting hard.” Even that bit of vulgarity can't cancel the power of their scandalous communion. It almost feels as if Blier were thumbing his nose at the Catholic cult of the Virgin Mary, insisting that real purity lies in the symbiosis of mother-child rather than the non-occurrence of intercourse. 



As the train pulls into the station the mother hurriedly disembarks, a smile at the prospect of seeing her husband playing over her features. Pierrot and Jean-Claude watch as the couple embraces, noting that the husband is sure to get his "rocks off" after they the warming-up they've given her. Punching the wall with his fists Pierrot exclaims: “Why can’t I get a boner?!”  


The developmental process of relinquishing male dependence and identification with the mother entails a series of demotions. Womankind is leveled in a context of radical inequality. In the often violent inversion of authority males take a more developmentally intricate path forward; more fraught and more profound. For object-choice is equally the affirmation of gender identity as separate-from.

In light of the dignified forbearance of Fossey's mother it is hard not to conclude that the female's self-possessed wisdom and her awareness as an offering on the altar of sexuality coincide. Her peculiar dignity is inscribed in her preparedness for sacrifice: once as object of male conquest, once more as vehicle of the Kind’s self-replication, one excruciating birth at a time. To call this "female masochism" is a gross mischaracterization. It is simply the fate of women.

The male with unfinished individuation conflicts reacts against the primacy of the female. Control is the only way he can venture into her precinct.  Whence the table-turning genius of Genesis--the founding myth of the patriarchal inversion of nature's hierarchy. 

Given that male machismo is an accepted part of most world cultures, one almost suspects that this is the man women want. After all, it should be within the power of the enculturing matrix of culture to create the strain best suited to partner-up with. Christiane Olivier's (Jocasta's Children) idea that one mother creates the legacy of misogyny for another may be interpreted as this 'intentional' failure. Ergo: in the dialectic of the sexes aggression it's no less instrumental than tenderness. What is erotic love if not a degrading idealization? 

The male enters the domain of female fertility and profligacy bringing competition and scarcity, asserting his individuality against the default rule of female nature. (As all humans are destined to be female in vitro, that some wind up male constitutes the exception.) Virility is an up-rising, protest, and subjugation. Though it too must be sacrificed in/on the womb/lap of Nature--the altar of the Kind’s self-propagation. 

It is this realization that propels the male's perpetual self-distancing and -differentiation, as if his masculine essence could never be sharply enough delimited from the engulfing female. This realization, and the insight that the violation of the female vouchsafes her sanctity, is what I discern in Fossey's inscrutable gaze. A gaze conveying the endlessly patient Mother in full consciousness of her own essential inviolability.



The concept of misogyny is inadequate because incomplete as descriptor of the complex mutual-interception of love and hatred across genders. 

One need only contrast Les Valseuses with the near contemporaneous The Last Detail to understand the difference between post-puritanical American prurience and the erotic exuberance of the French. There is a
decidedly anti-libidinal grimness to the masculinity of Nicholson and his cohorts. By comparison Blier’s duo seems omni-sexual—playful, enchanted, and wounded.




The pair next break into a seaside condominium and make themselves at home. After sniffing a bra and panties to divine the age of its owner, they bathe, Jean-Claude washing Pierrot’s legs and hair. “See how handsome you are,” he quips looking over Pierrot’s shoulder into the mirror as he trims his mustache. “You almost turn me on,” he adds, putting his hand where it doesn’t belong. “Take your hand off, fag,” Pierrot calmly demands. "It’s nothing to be ashamed of," Jean-Claude replies. “It’s not a question of shame but of not wanting to.” “How do you know if you’ve never tried?” Jean-Claude presses. “You really think you can turn me on?” Pierrot exclaims, pushing him away. Finally Jean-Claude picks him up from behind and carries him towards the bed. Blier cuts to them walking down a desolate beach-front street as Pierrot cries “I feel humiliated!” “It’s only natural between friends," Jean-Claude insists.

Such a scene would be inconceivable in a contemporaneous American film about male friendship. In The Last Detail the merest hint of eroticism between buddies would completely annul its moral code of masculine affiliation, predicated as it is on shared fear, anger, and lust for women. Therein lies the antilibidinal obscenity of Ashby's film. 


They return to Miou Miou. “Screw if you want to,” she declares, whereupon Pierrot,
offended by her vulgarity, slaps her.  “None of your lip…We’ll screw if we feel like it.” She calls them fags. Pierrot squeezes her breasts till she winces. “You’re a hooker, right?” “Yes, a dirty hooker,” she replies. They wind up in bed taking turns as she yawns. “I’m fine,” she blithely replies when Jean-Claude, demonstrating his superior technique, inquires into her state of mind.



“She’s a hole with pubes around it!” Jean-Claude complains in exhausted frustration after failing to arouse her: “an unfeeling aperture.”  “You can flip over, the fuck is over.” Jean-Claude informs her. “Have you no modesty?” 
(literally: “Hey-modesty, familiar with it?”), Pierrot adds hypocritically. Unfazed by their vulgarity, she sits up between them. “Sorry we’re not more romantic,” Jean-Claude half-apologizes. 

Some will see Miou Miou’s taking her place between the two, instead of running out of the room in protest, as one more failure of an unemancipated woman to demonstrate self-respect. I would argue that the film is not about individual character as bearer of virtues and vices, but about relationship per se. The most proximate horizon of Blier’s distillation of character is what Kegan has called the "interpersonal equilibrium," characterized by a thorough-going egalitarian interchangeability of selves regardless of gender. One might call it the politics of absolute friendship. 

A moralizing point of view on Blier’s film is not invalid, but irrelevant. In a deeper sense, of course, the moral perspective is all-pervasive and indispensable. But it must not mislead us to gratuitously censuring a work for celebrating boorish excess. Les Valseuses shows that, however proximately belligerent, the male search for connection is finally benign. 

The capacity to absorb male aggression is one reason why the charge of misogyny has been leveled against Blier, on the understanding that the female has no special capacity for 'object-constancy.' I argue that while tolerance ideally constitutes a two-way street paved by love and forgiveness, a specifically female form of forbearance nonetheless enjoys a special status in the hierarchy of values cherished by men. That such a view is 'andro-centric' does not constitute the grounds for its invalidity. In a film explicitly thematizing male sexual freedom in all its juvenility, and therewith the dynamics of male individuation, the indulgence of women necessarily enjoys an unconditional numinosity. One that goes hand-in-hand with the idealization of the female qua victim. 

Blier's emplotment of male emancipation traipses down a path of least resistance (= regression) towards a point of peak vulnerability, in the direction opposite anarchic gangster machismo.


The duo next hooks up with a woman released from prison after serving a ten year sentence (the ever melancholy-dignified Jeanne Moreau). Overcoming her reluctance to accept help, they take her to lunch at a seaside restaurant. Pierrot and  Jean-Claude, visibly smitten with the “plain” older woman, observe her mysterious, self-contained ways as she savors her meal. Afterwards she informs a visibly taken-aback patronesse how lucky she is to bleed regularly, a reference to her pre-menopausal fertility. 

The gentleness and maturity of the interlude with Moreau, a kind of poignant idyll, stands in stark contrast to the rest of Blier's satyr-play. The restaurant scene, with the figures shot against the sunny ocean, reminded me of a similar set-up in Altman's The Last Goodbye, featuring Vilmos Zsigmond's famous flashing technique.



After a walk on an overcast beach they get a room and have a passionate threesome. Awaking between the slumbering lovers, the inscrutable older women goes to an adjoining bedroom and commits off-camera suicide by firing a gun into her vagina.

They hire another newly released convict to come screw Miou Miou. The unprepossessing young man succeeds in getting her off. Pierrot and Jean-Claude are out fishing when she races up half-naked to break the news. They pick her up and throw her in the river. Twice. As a result of his unlikely prowess the upstart is served first at dinner, as Pierrot and Jean-Claude look on with a mixture of admiration and annoyance. 


Later while driving together at night Miou Miou pipes up from the back seat with a straight-forward request: “Please fuck me. I need to know” (i.e, that she is capable of repeating her feat). Pierrot obliges, jumping into the back seat for a romp as Jean-Claude steers down the dark highway, their feet smacking into the back of his head. They stop to switch places as Miou Miou nears orgasm. Cut to the three of them marching along in solidarity en route to another car heist. 


Concerned that she not be implicated by hanging around accomplices to murder, Jean-Claude bids Miou Miou adieu at the side of the road. “The thought of you rotting in jail makes me sick. You’re too pretty and fragile,” he insists. “You need love and affection.” He kisses her tenderly. But the next scene she’s still around. Hitching a ride after another stolen car goes up in smoke. She curses the “lousy stinkin’ proletarians” who won’t stop. It's lines like that which make the film unintentionally funny. 



Their final escapade involves appropriating the Citoyen of a picnicing family they proceed to tear apart, turning the daughter (a fresh-faced Isabelle Hupert) against her own father, before taking her away for an impromptu plein-air orgy, screwing another captive soul to liberation. 


Driving through the Pyrenees at dusk, Jean-Claude muses on their fate as libertines. "Everything'll work out. They can't put a hole in our ass. We already got one." Pierrot, less sanguine, protests: "We can't just drive around aimlessly till we run out of gas." "Why not?" Jean-Claude replies."Aren't we fine?...In the cool of the evening. Hanging loose. We can fuck anytime we want." 

Wars may rage, systems exploit and governments betray, but as long as pleasure abounds we have a bulwark against destruction. That sounds cynical, but represents a valid truth. We are, in the end, just animals huddling together for warmth in an inhuman universe. The answer for Blier is clear: affiliate. What sustains in the end is the bond of friendship--even if it is only between 'fuck-buddies.'



Finis.

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