The French film director Bertrand Blier, the creator of cult and provocative films such as Les Valseuses, Buffet Froid, and Tenue de Soirée, has died. The veteran filmmaker, celebrated for his daring and unconventional storytelling, was behind some of France's most iconic arthouse successes of the 1970s and 1980s. He was also instrumental in launching the international career of French actor Gérard Depardieu.
Blier, who was born in 1939, died peacefully at home Monday night in Paris, surrounded by his wife and children, his son Leonard Blier, said.
Several French personalities praised his career, noting that his works were firmly rooted in a bygone era.
"In films that captured the spirit of their time, he gave iconic roles to some of the greatest actors. Bertrand Blier was a remarkable and unconventional filmmaker, passionately devoted to the freedom of creation," wrote French Culture Minister Rachida Dati.
"Both a writer and a filmmaker – cynical yet provocative, moralistic yet jaded – Bertrand Blier loved women, but he made them suffer at the hands of his male characters," Gilles Jacob, a former president of the Cannes Film Festival, added.
Depardieu's career
He followed in his father's footsteps, starting in cinema as an assistant director. In 1963, he directed his father Bernard Blier, in his first feature, "If I Were A Spy".
In 1974, Blier shocked France and launched Gérard Depardieu's career with Les Valseuses, a subversive tale about a pair of joyriding young thugs on a sex and crime spree across the country.
The title, which means testicles in French slang, was rather primly translated as "Going Places" for its American release.
Based on Blier's own novel, it became a cult classic and was the first of his nine movies with Depardieu, whom Blier later described as "my pet actor, my cinema brother, my alter-ego".
A parable of male unease at women's liberation, many at the time found Les Valseuses morally ambiguous and its sex scenes brutal and vulgar, but its theme would dominate almost all of his later work.
His work is currently facing criticism for its misogyny and the way it portrays male dominance. In recent years, some of his actresses, such as Miou-Miou and Brigitte Fossey, have shared that they sometimes experienced his crude humor as an humiliation or an assault.
'Wounded machismo'
The same 'wounded machismo' ran through his biggest international hit, Trop belle pour toi ("Too Beautiful For You") in 1989, with Depardieu playing a man who grows bored by his beautiful wife and falls for his much plainer secretary.
Regarded as something of a modern classic, the New York Times called it an "exceptionally rich romantic comedy".
It also won Blier the jury prize at the Cannes film festival and five Cesars including best actress for Depardieu's then real-life partner, Carole Bouquet, who played the wife.
"What intrigues me again and again is how male friendships are relatively unproblematic, and yet when men approach what they passionately desire, then their problems begin," he said.
Blier burst onto the scene at a time when France's New Wave directors were running out of steam, with his black comedies peopled with marginal figures, villains, rogue policemen and prostitutes, seen as unique and unclassifiable.
He said he found modern cinema "irritating", though many found echos of his work in that of Spanish surrealist director Luis Bunuel.
Oscar success
In 1979, he won the best foreign film Oscar with the menage-a-trois comedy "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs", again featuring the Depardieu-Dewaere duo.
In 1980, he won a Cesar for Buffet Froid (Cold Cuts), a mixture of absurd and realism, in which he directed his father for the last time, inevitably alongside Depardieu.
A born iconoclast, he was never happier than when poking fun at social mores, and had another hit with the provocative Tenue de Soiree (Evening Wear) in 1986, took on homosexuality and sex triangles.
By the 1990s and 2000s after a string of commercial flops, Blier was having trouble securing funding for his films.
In 2010 he returned to surrealism with the "Clink of Ice" which broached cancer, with an alcoholic writer played by Jean Dujardin talking about his illness, which takes the form of a man played by Albert Dupontel.
(with AFP)
