Elio Petri, an underappreciated master (Part 1 of two)

“I… believe in mainstream culture…. Concessions to the audience? Frankly, I don’t think I make concessions; I, myself, am part of this audience.” (Elio Petri, from two separate interviews; both quotes included in Petri’s Writing on Cinema and Life on p. xvii)

I’m very proud of the career retrospectives I’ve done thus far on this blog (and the Funhouse TV series), although they are currently not easily found by many online searchers, due to the fact that Google no longer “crawls” its own properties (including Blogger/Blogspot). Thus, there may be a big change coming up.... But more on that at another time. In the meantime, I wanted to talk about my fascination with the films of Elio Petri, a filmmaker who created a small but incredibly consistent and potent body of work. 

He is best known for The 10th Victim, his sexiest-looking film and his most overtly commercial endeavor. But his filmography, although small, really does have a consistency and a repetition of certain motifs that are utterly fascinating, as they belong very much to the period in which the films were made (from 1961 to 1979), but they also harken to a type of political cinema that used to be practiced in several countries, but most especially in Italy.

Petri in the Sixties.

I mentioned in the trio of pieces I wrote about Ken Loach that political cinema simply doesn’t exist anymore in America, meaning fiction films with political narratives. There are politically-minded documentaries and some indie docs that definitely have political messages, but fiction film in the U.S. does not go near topics of political interest (with, yes, a few stray — and they are quite stray — exceptions) because it simply won’t sell. Those interested in political films would more likely see a documentary with the same content, and fiction filmmakers know that a political message is currently anathema to American viewers.

Elio Petri crafted five brilliant, overtly political films that still hit very hard and are still relatable in their basic themes. For those who like to tally the numbers, he only made a dozen theatrical fiction features in total, plus a TV adaptation of a classic play (which is incredibly political) and a small handful of shorts. Out of that dozen features, five of the half-dozen I’m going to review in this part of the discussion about Petri (which will also be going on in weeks to come on the Funhouse TV show) seem to not be overtly political.

The Japanese
poster for
10th Victim.

Not overtly political on the surface, that is. Petri was a student of the Neo-realist movement. His first significant job in the film world was to conduct “investigations” on certain social problems for use by the director Giuseppe De Santis, so that De Santis would be able to weave a fiction with his scripters that would have some basis in reality. The notion of investigation became an integral part of his own filmmaking, in terms of him looking into problems and trying to find scenarios that reflected those problems.

In five of the six films here, he used the trappings of genre movies to make comments on political realities. He was quoted as saying, “A political film must be made in a popular form.” Thus, his films might seem like straightforward whodunits or sci-fi satires, giallo thrillers, and crime pictures, but they still convey something about the society in which they were made, as well as the international situation of that time. Five of the films in this part of my survey (minus 10th Victim) also qualify as well-sketched character studies.

I will note that the film that drew me to engaging in a “bender” of Petri’s work was Todo Modo, his most dense and complex (and extremely rewarding) film. It is the kind of a film that you can take on face value and enjoy as a political thriller/social satire, but any amount of thought expended on it is rewarded, as one realizes it is a comment on the way politics worked in Italy in the Seventies, and by extension, around the world (in any time period). 

Now that I’ve seen all of his features, except for the completely missing Nudo per vivere, I can easily say that five of the dozen films (substituting the miniseries, Dirty Hands for the missing Nudo) are true masterworks. Four of the films are excellent, while the remaining three are uneven but have some great scenes in them. You’ll be able to spot which are which as I move through Signore Petri’s work….

The Assassin (1961). A pungent character study wrapped up in the trappings of a clever murder mystery, this film showed that screenwriter Elio Petri (who had 15 produced screenplays to his credit at this time) was a very elegant and yet no-nonsense filmmaker. He was still relatively young (32) at the time, but this film and his second one, His Days Are Numbered, show Petri creating a style that drew on the neo-realist movement (read: documentary aspects and heightened emotion in a fiction feature) as well as the French New Wave (who were in his age group).

Here, the script by Petri and Pasquale Festa Campanile, Massimo Franciosa, and Tonino Guerra is indeed about an investigation, in this case a murder investigation. An antiques dealer (Marcello Mastroianni) who is always in debt and is also a big crook (buying good-looking items for low amounts of money and selling them for inflated prices) is arrested for the murder of his wealthy patron (Micheline Presle), with whom he’s been having an affair.

The arrest and subsequent events are the frame device for the film, which deftly cuts between the present and the past. We see the antique dealer deny that he killed his patron, but then we see his crooked attitude toward his clients and begin to doubt his innocence. The plot is further complicated by the disappearance of his fiancee, a plot element that seems very intriguing (and damning for him) but which amounts to a mere distraction.

After the arrest takes place, we see the cops playing games with Mastroianni’s head, as they view him through a two-way mirror, they pound on the door of the waiting room that he’s being kept in, and the police inspector (Salvo Randone, who was cast in nearly all of Petri’s films) takes the phone off the hook to prevent “distractions,” while he’s actually allowing the other policemen to more clearly listen in to the interrogation. This sort of toying with Mastroianni continues when he is put in a jail cell with two crooks who seem to be informers trying to get him to confess to the murder he’s been charged with.

The most intriguing scenes here are the ones that sketch the underside of Mastroianni’s character. He has a friend who is lusting after Marcello’s maid, so he tricks her into believing his friend is a doctor who must “examine” her (thus, getting her to undress for both him and the “doctor”).

His patron wants to give money to a drunk on an empty road late at night, but Marcello tags him as a con artist — until he sees that the man has leapt from a bridge and was indeed suicidal. A scene where he meets his mother, visiting Rome for an afternoon, shows how he doesn’t really know how to relate to other human beings.

Mastroianni and Presle.

The solution to the mystery is not exactly rewarding, but it does provide us with a view of Marcello crying (after the real killer is found), which is undercut by an epilogue scene taking place a year later, in which he is having a tryst with his (now ex-)fiancee, whom he clearly just wants sexually. The brilliantly written concluding scene finds him ordering a sports car on the phone, and bragging to the dealer, “Do you know who you’re talking to? The lady killer!”

The film shows that Petri knew what he was after, even in his debut behind the camera. There is a calm, quiet pace to the proceedings, with certain plot strands not registering when you see it for the first time, but the film gains depth with repeated viewings.

Debuting here is one of the devices that Petri would use over the course of his career, namely linking the past to the present in one long take. Here we see Marcello on a bed in a flashback, then Petri’s camera pivots to the inspector in a chair (in the present). The inspector gets up and walks to the next room, only to find Marcello (now in the present) talking. The inspector walks back into the bedroom, where we see Marcello and Micheline Presle talking (in the past). It seems confusing on paper, but it is executed so beautifully that one feels the crushing weight of the past on Mastroianni’s character.

Of course, Mastroianni is perfect in the lead role, sleazy but still dignified throughout. The score for the film was composed by Piero Piccioni, who was one of Italy’s leading film composers (he wrote 300 scores), working with the likes of Visconti, De Sica, Rosi, Wertmuller, Bertolucci, and repeatedly with the comedian-turned-filmmaker Alberto Sordi.

His Days Are Numbered (1962). Petri’s first masterpiece is a film that has never been distributed on any home-entertainment medium in the U.S. It’s a touching work that beautifully combines Petri’s neo-realist influences (in the storytelling and the documentary feel of certain scenes) with his interest in the French New Wave (in the visuals). 

Although he was only 33 when the film came out, it definitely qualifies as his “old age” film, in the manner of Umberto D but also Wild Strawberries and Ikiru. In interviews Petri said he based the lead character on his father, who worked as a tinsmith. 

Petri in the trolley car that appears
at the beginning of the film. (This photo
takes on added resonance 
when you see the film.)

Throughout the film, we move through the Roman landscape with “personalized” camerawork that sometimes takes on the protagonist’s viewpoint but also positions him in oddly framed shots (a la Godard) and shows us things before he sees them. There are no genre movie trappings here; this is purely and simply a character study, and a quite eloquent one at that.

The plot concerns a plumber (Salvo Randone) who sees a man his own age die on a trolley car that he’s on. The next day he refuses to get out of bed and go to his job because he just doesn’t feel like working any more. He feels the crushing weight of age and wants to enjoy life rather than deal with the pressures of his job. 

He proceeds to have a series of encounters with other characters at various stations in life. First, he talks to his friend who works painting crosswalk lines on the pavement outside the Colosseum. He tries to revive his relationship with an old lover, who is now a grandmother working at a community bath house. He meets an art patron in a museum who wants to show him the art he pays for — but really only wants to have him fix the plumbing in his artist’s studio.

He meets his son, who wants him to go back to work. He visits the beach with his friends and muses on death with them and tries to have sex with a hooker, but he doesn’t have the “spirit.” A visit to his hometown (which he wants to move back to) shows him that the community there is comprised of many unemployed people. Some of them are alcoholics, because of the emptiness in their lives — “Wine is used to kill time,” he is told. He follows a beggar who sings on the street home and finds that he actually lives quite well; the beggar tells him his philosophy of stealing and getting what one needs.

Given the impressively errant nature of the storyline (with the patron of the arts supplying a true assessment of our antihero: “without even knowing it, you’re an existentialist”), the film’s third act is surprisingly harrowing. The plumber is pitched a criminal enterprise (insurance fraud), for which he must have his arm broken. The scene in which he can’t voluntarily submit to the pain is a dark one, both in tone and visually, as Petri’s summons up an image of a crooked enterprise that is scarier than what is seen in many crime movies.

Randone ultimately returns to his plumbing job. (His final existential musing: ““Working doesn’t let you think. Actually, it chases the thoughts away.”) And one night he’s on a trolley car and all kinds of sights and sounds flood into his mind as he looks out the window. He then is found dead, just like the man he saw at the opening of the film.

A characteristically off-center framing
from His Days.

The above description doesn’t do justice to the film, which is, again, very innovatively shot and beautifully acted. Randone was a stage actor by trade, and his performance here is thoroughly relatable and wonderfully nuanced. Days is the kind of low-key character study that would’ve, in other eras, been internationally popular and very well-received by critics. Instead it is one of Petri’s least-seen films and one that definitely needs to be placed in the lineage of top-notch Italian films of the Sixties. 

And for those like this reviewer who are old enough to keep track of how old that the “old characters” in movies are, it’s interesting to note that Randone’s plumber is only 53 years of age when he has this “end-of-life” moment of wondering “Is that all there is?”

Petri’s next film, The Master of Vigevano (1963) was made because he liked the novel the film was based on and because he wanted to work with comic actor Alberto Sordi, who also appeared in serious films (and later became a filmmaker himself). As a result of this unholy union of an intellectual/artistic filmmaker and an immensely popular commercial performer, Master is an uneven Petri film. But, like his other misfires, there are some great scenes here.

The film sketches the life of an underpaid schoolteacher (Sordi) who makes so little that his wife (Claire Bloom) wears his underwear at night to keep warm. He may be poor, but he puts his dignity first — he finds that his wife has borrowed money from a local industrialist, and he pays it back immediately. As a result his wife goes to work in a factory, to raise their standard of living.

His wife eventually asks him to quite his teaching jobs, as she and her brother have come up with a scheme: to run a shoe-making business from the Sordi family apartment. Sordi, however, gets the company investigated and it is closed down.

Bloom and Sordi.

Here, the third act is an absolute mess, with the film turning from comedy-drama to tragedy, as Sordi’s best friend kills himself and Bloom begins to cheat on Sordi with the industrialist. She is eventually killed in a car crash with the industrialist (in what seems like a weird foreshadowing of the finale of Contempt, which was released the same year) and Sordi returns to his teaching job, now submitting openly to the abuse from the principal that he had earlier freed himself from.

The film suffered as a result of disagreements between Petri and Sordi, who disliked Petri’s approach to the material. Here, the schizo nature of the material is reflected by the fact that the character goes on a downward spiral but still has Walter Mitty-like fantasies that clash with the otherwise realistic tone of the picture.

Although only 105 mins, the film feels much longer than it should be. One of its saving graces is a score by the great Nino Rota, which at least adds some levity and wistfulness to the proceedings. 

Petri’s next film, the science-fiction satire The 10th Victim (1965), is his best known and is a lot of fun. That said, it is far from his best work, as its plot moves along on the same level throughout, with an occasional new idea cropping up. In short, the film works better on the visual level than as a piece of storytelling. 

Ursula and Marcello.

The film was the product of two of Petri’s private obsessions, as he read science fiction for pleasure and was also a student of modern art, so he was well acquainted with the pop art of the period. The picture thus looks terrific, with gorgeous imagery inspired by painters and sculptors of the period. Petri biographer Roberto Curti notes that items seen in the film clearly evoke works by George Segal, Joe Tilson, Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, and Roy Lichtenstein. (Not forgetting the comic books seen in the film, including giant reproductions of panels from “Flash Gordon.”) 

The plot is a futuristic variation on The Most Dangerous Game (one of the most ripped-off thrillers ever written). It is the 21st century and violence has been legalized into a sport called “The Big Hunt.” All around the world Hunters and Victims are designated, and the more kills a Hunter makes, the more he or she become rich and famous. 

The film starts in the thick of things with an Asian man hunting a woman on the streets of NYC (in the Wall St district). The woman, played by Bond girl supreme Ursula Andress, ducks into a nightclub and reappears as the strip act performing inside. The Asian man enters, sits down to watch the show — and is abruptly killed by Andress, who has guns located inside her bra. 

We then switch to Italy where Marcello Mastroianni plays a celebrated Hunter who knocks off a garden-variety German stereotype (who looks like a Nazi but is called “Baron von Richtofen”). He then gets his next assignment: He will be a Victim instead of a Hunter, and Ursula (who is playing an American) will be his Hunter. Her agents set up a deal for her to kill Marcello at the Temple of Venus in Rome; his elimination will be part of a TV ad campaign (for “Ming tea”). Both Ursula and Marcello have to obey the rules of the hunt, which allow for a lot of mayhem but innocent victims must never be killed or the Hunter will go to jail.

The rest of the film consists of Hunter and Victim playing cat-and-mouse with each other, while a subtle seduction goes on between the two. Along the way we encounter numerous items that come from Robert Sheckley’s original novel, as well as things concocted by Petri and his coscripters Tonino Guerra (who worked with Antonioni, De Sica, later Fellini, and Tarkovsky, among others), Giorgio Salvioni, and Ennio Flajano (earlier Fellini). These include the fact that, in this TV-centric society comic books are treated like literary classics. (Marcello swears his affinity to Lee Falk’s The Phantom — says he, “I’m a romantic”). There are also “relaxation service centers” along roadways, and participants in the various hunts can go to the Ministry of the Hunt building; those who are just fans can attend Hunt Clubs, where gladiatorial combat takes place. 

Other odd elements show up, like the fact that Marcello — whose character has basically no dimensions except his vocation as a Hunter and the fact that he’s cheating on his wife with a mistress who wants him to marry her — runs a side-hustle as the head of a cult of “sunset worshippers” (who are routinely mocked by an opposing group of moon worshippers). We also find that (three years before Wild in the Streets), old people must be gotten rid of in this society, so Marcello hides his parents in a secret room in his house.

The humorous bits in the film are hit and miss, but some moments resound quite nicely. Among them is the fact that, no matter how sleek and futuristic 21st century Italy is, divorce is still illegal. (Thus, Marcello desperately tries to annul his marriage.) Also, the fact that different advertisers will be involved if Marcello kills his Hunter (which is a legal part of the game) than will be the case if Ursula gets her “tenth victim” (namely Marcello). Initially, Marcello’s sponsor panics when he hears that a girl will be killed on television, but Marcello’s agent clues him in by asking, “Did you know that this year it’s said to be ‘in’ to kill girls?”

Elsa Martinelli.

Petri decided that Marcello needed to have blonde hair for this film; this puts him back into the type of character he played in his films of the 1950s (where he was definitely cast as a pretty boy), but his diffidence toward all the women throwing themselves at him is definitely part of the alienated early Sixties.

By this, his fourth film, Petri was starting to assemble a crew that he used for each of his films. Salvo Randone appears again, this time as a Bond-villain-ish character wearing a neck brace and sporting steel teeth (decades before the “Jaws” character in the Bond movies). Ruggero Mastroianni, brother of Marcello, also became Petri’s editor of choice with The Master of Vigevano and remained in this position until Petri’s last film, Good News.

Besides wonderful production design work by Sergio Canevari (The Battle of Algiers), the film also boasts a very bouncy score by Piero Piccioni that blends playful organ music with sublime vocalese. In essence, 10th Victim toys with the notion of what modernist Italian films felt like to foreign viewers. It is thus an anomaly in Petri’s filmography and, since it is so easy to grasp and extremely cool-looking, it has been the Petri film that has been distributed the most on home entertainment formats in the U.S. 

“To Each His Own” was the original Italian title for the film we know as We Still Kill the Old Way (1967), which is one of two masterworks (along with His Days Are Numbered) in this half-dozen films. The most impressive thing about it is how low-key it is for a film that depicts a completely corrupt milieu in a bright and sunny Sicilian small town, with a lead character who means well but is deluded from the start.

Petri was a fan of detective fiction, which makes sense if you consider that some of his greatest films are murder mysteries at their core but proceed to veer around the whodunit aspects to become very incisive character studies. Petri said that his intention here was to make “an unconventional giallo,” which he did, primarily by avoiding many of the hallmarks of the giallo (which, aside from the great scores found in those films, are elements lifted from other thrillers).

The plot, taken from a novel by Leonardo Sciascia, concerns a small town in which a pharmacist is receiving anonymous threatening letters in the mail, which are constructed via words cut out of newspapers (in this case, L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper that the great Father Guido Sarducci wrote for). The pharmacist is then killed, along with a doctor friend, while he is out hunting one morning.

Our protagonist, a law professor (Gian Maria Volontè) who lives with his mother, starts investigating the murder and finds out that the pharmacist and his affairs (and the threatening letters) were a smoke screen; the killers were actually out to eliminate the doctor. Volontè is soon informed by a friend that the doctor had secret info about a resident of the Sicilian town who is involved in various organizations (one of the nice, oblique references to the Mafia) and is entirely corrupt. 

Volontè continues to assemble the puzzle pieces, until he makes a fatal error in falling for the widow (Irene Papas) of the slain doctor. He obsesses over her, although she keeps rebuffing him and it becomes apparent that her cousin (Gabriel Ferzetti), a very well-connected man in the town, is likely the individual about whom the doctor had damning evidence. 

The cat and the mouse:
Gabriele Ferzetti
and Gian Maria Volontè

Our hero initially blunders into some valid truths, but his love for the widow ultimately becomes his downfall. He hasn’t understood that the forces of the church, the government, and the Mafia (all embodied in the figure of the cousin) are going to keep secrets from coming out, and Volontè is in fact walking right into a set-up. 

Despite bearing an English-language title that sounds like it came off a tongue-in-cheek spaghetti Western, We Still Kill is a masterclass in crafting a character study that also happens to be an indictment of how deeply corrupt a sleepy small town can be, and how different institutions will eliminate those who find out the truth about their complicity with each other. 

For one thing, the word “Mafia” is never uttered — we simply see goons and henchmen appearing in different sequences and it’s clear that they are following orders from someone in the community. Petri and his coscripter Ugo Pirro (who went on to coscript Petri’s “trilogy of neuroses” in the Seventies) also brilliantly put at the center of the narrative a clueless hero who thinks he’s capable of solving the murders and bringing the killer to justice. In truth, he’s completely adrift and doesn’t realize that he’s being suckered into victim status by the widow. 

Volontè and Papas.

Petri introduces the world of his best Seventies films here by depicting a completely corrupt community. He is aided dutifully in this by the sunny imagery, which is lovingly rendered by d.p. Luigi Kuveiller, who wound up crafting equally haunting visions for the quartet of “corrupt world” films that Petri made in the Seventies. Composer Luis Bacalov also does a beautiful job of “commenting” on the action via a playful score that sounds light-hearted but also seems to be underscoring how futile the efforts made by Volontè ultimately are. 

Everyone in the film is perfectly cast, but Petri’s use of Volontè is particularly apt. The actor went on to work with him three more times, in each case creating a very memorable (and very different) characterization. Here he is centerstage, assuming a crouched, threatened posture throughout the picture, constantly toting a leather document bag and some newspapers. Petri biographer Robert Curti noted that the character is “too focused on details to notice the bigger picture” and is far too devoted to the idea of justice for his two murdered friends (and passion for the widow) to understand the game being played on him.

Petri’s last film in the Sixties and the last to be treated in this part of my survey (I should say “investigation,” but Petri biographer Roberto Curti got there first) is A Quiet Place in the Country (1968). It is one of my least-faves of his films because it starts out as a very challenging work and winds up a straightforward giallo, albeit one with incredible skill in its art direction, cinematography, and music. (I’m not a big giallo fan — they have wonderful music and are frequently wonderful on a visual level, but their storytelling is often mundane and stolen from older horror films and Hitchcock thrillers. Bava seemed to be the exception, whereas a deathly dull filmmaker like Jess Franco became the rule.)

The film’s opening six minutes are terrific, constituting Petri’s most “Sixties” sequence ever (and that’s after he made 10th Victim, which was “mod” but was also set in the future). The credits are a mix of paintings and grainy, scratchy film leader. Experimental music — made by Ennio Morricone and the “gruppo di improvvisazioni NUOVA CONSONANZA” — plays throughout the scene. 

An artist (Franco Nero) sits in a chair, tied up and wearing only a towel as a kind of diaper. His girlfriend (Vanessa Redgrave, Nero’s real-life partner back in the Sixties and from 2006 on) comes in and tells him about the electronic gadgets she has bought. (“… an electric toothbrush, a transistor refrigerator, an electric knife sharpener, an erotic electro-magnet...”) She proceeds to come toward him and bites his chest, then plugs in all the devices. Nero’s image can be seen between his own legs on a small TV screen, while the noise of the machines mingles with the noise-music.

Redgrave and Nero.

Nero frees himself from the ropes, takes a carving knife, and follows Redgrave into the bathroom. He is too scared to attack her; she pushes him into the shower wall and proceeds to stab him (below camera level). He is next seen in a bathtub with Redgrave still stabbing him, with alternating images of her nude and clothed. He wakes up — it was all a dream. 

This opening scene is indeed the most radical-looking sequence in any of Petri’s films but, true to form for the rest of the film, he had to “ground” it in a familiar artist-going-mad trope in order to present it in a mainstream Italian movie. The film settles into a familiar ghost story plotline after that, where the moments of horror are seen as emanating from Nero’s mind as he goes insane. 

The details of the plot seem very familiar: Nero’s character wants to get away from the city, and so he chooses a mansion to stay in to get his artistic juices flowing again. We soon learn that Redgrave is not just his girlfriend, she’s also the gallery owner who sells his works to rich art collectors. 

The house he’s staying in “destroys” his artwork one night. He then learns about the countess who owned the house and died during a British air-raid on the area during WWII; she is said to be haunting the house. The film has numerous anti-climaxes, including one truly unpleasant scene where Nero brutally beats Redgrave to death (shown as reality — then, of course, as a fantasy). 

The film is Petri’s only horror picture — he referred We Still Kill and his later Todo Modo as giallos, but as noted above, We Still Kill is a top-notch character study while Todo is a very complex work that functions as a whodunit, a political satire, and a provocation aimed at a specific Italian political party. 

That said, Nero and Redgrave do make a very attractive couple. And the technical work done by Luigi Kuveiller (d.p), Ruggero Mastroianni (editor), Morricone (providing his first score for Petri; he scored every Petri film after this), and art director Sergio Canevari is excellent. Petri also ensured that the artwork was true to the moment the film was made in by using the paintings of Jim Dine, who also was the model for Nero’s artistic side and visited the set of the film. 

Nero and Petri.

Petri closed out the Sixties with an uneven piece of work that is too conventional on certain levels to be one of his great works. He began the Seventies, though, with the film that would establish his name internationally and jumpstart his second career as a political filmmaker.

Bibliography:

Curti, Roberto, Investigation of a Filmmaker, McFarland and Company, 2021

Petri, Elio Writings on Cinema & Life, (edited by Jean A. Gill; translated by Camilla Zamboni and Erika Marina Nadir), Contra Mundum Press, 2013 

NOTE: I thank cineaste pal Paul Gallagher for help in obtaining some of the films.

Some notes on ‘Pee-Wee as Himself’

On the subject of the current Pee-Wee Herman doc on HBO and its streaming platform (neither of which I subscribe to), there’s a documentary (The Humiliated, 1998) about the making of Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, where the director asked to interview von Trier, who said no, definitely not. Then Lars presented the director with a “diary”-like narration that he thought the director would want. When the director had fitted his making-of film around the narration, he realized that Lars had, indeed, controlled his documentary and changed the way it was shaped and structured. 

That’s exactly what Paul Reubens did to his docu-biographer Matt Wolf in the current HBO offering, Pee-Wee as Himself. Reubens did consent to interviews but then proceeded to badger Wolf about how he’d handle different topics and asking why it was exactly that he (Reubens) couldn’t direct his own life story. 

Of course by doing this Reubens *was* co-directing the film and making sure that it went in certain directions. (He was also hiding a cancer battle he was going through, so he most likely thought he couldn’t work on the completion of the film, which drove the perfectionist in him totally nuts.) 

The film’s title was carefully chosen. The other result is that we see Reubens for the very first time speaking at length about his life and the Pee-Wee Herman character. In fact, the more we see of the real Paul Reubens, especially when he’s badgering Wolf, the more we see that Pee-Wee was an extension of his own personality: 

Making the filmmaker his straight man.
[in a manner of speaking]

He was clearly a detail-oriented perfectionist (even when dealing with the smallest of gags), but he could also be caustic and obnoxious — and then incredibly charming on top of it all. To wit, my favorite moment [to Wolf, about wanting things his own way]: "Really, if you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong. No, I don’t really think that…. All right, maybe I do think that a little bit. No, I don’t. I’m kidding. Or am I? I don’t know.… I don’t know if I’m kidding. I know. [chuckles] But you don’t."

All in all, it’s a fascinating look at a man who did indeed hide himself completely behind his character, until the first of two life-changing arrests went down. 

A rarely seen view of the Playhouse set.

Personal disclosure: I own a "talking Pee-Wee Herman" doll. Before I discuss the other key themes and touching moments in the film, I should note that I began being a Pee-Wee Herman fan when I saw him do his shtick in the early Eighties on Merv Griffin and then a series of guest shots on Letterman. The latter are included in the documentary, reminding one of just how intentionally fucking awful Letterman was as a straight man (unless you were one of those horrific standups he came up with — George Miller, Jimmy “J.J.” Walker, etc.).

I was fresh out of school when “Pee-Wee’s Playhouse” began its run (thus, an actual adult), but by then I was already sold on Reubens’ character, thanks to Pee-Wee's Big Adventure and his appearances on television. Thus, I came to the Wolf documentary with vivid memories of Paul/Pee-Wee at his most famous and then at his most infamous. 

That last becomes an issue in the doc, as we get to see various entertainers (Sam Kinison, Soupy Sales, former collaborator Phil Hartman) condemning Reubens for the porn-theater masturbation arrest. Although that arrest did put the damper on doing the Pee-Wee character (until a 2010 Broadway run of the original Groundlings-era show and a 2016 final Pee-Wee film on Netflix), it did not squash the ardor of his diehard followers, who liked him more when they found out he had some normal, everyday traits, like horniness. Thus, those condemning Reubens (incl. the former “dirty” and then pious [and always-drab] Howard Stern) wound up looking like narrow-minded scolds. 

Filling in the gaps: Who was Paul Reubens? What was Wolf able to get from Reubens, even at the height of Herman-hectoring that Reubens put him through? A full portrait of his life from childhood through his 30s. It’s the first time Reubens openly addressed his life as a gay man at any length, going so far as to talk about the one deeply committed relationship he had with another man (an artist named Guy) and how he broke it up so he could further concentrate on his career. 

P.R. in drag.

As Native American
lounge singer
"Jay Longtoe."

That fact alone is fascinating, as is Reubens using the phrase “duo” instead of “couple” when describing his relationship with Guy. (“Duo” does sound a lot more show-biz than couple.) He notes how much comfort he found in the relationship, but that he wanted a flourishing career more than that connection with another person, and so… he was off!

The doc also addresses the fact that he discarded some other people on his rise to the top (including the manager who got him the movie deal for Big Adventure, thereby making Pee-Wee pretty much a household name). Thus, Reubens was okay with airing some of his dirty laundry. Wolf additionally adds in (via the Stern interview with Phil Hartman) one of the most persistent rumors about the Pee-Wee character — that Reubens developed the character and the Playhouse concept initially with several other members of the Groundlings and then used their contributions on the “Playhouse” TV series without giving them credit. 

His proudest moment. Of all the reflections on his work, it seems particularly interesting that Reubens prized above many other big moments his being able to create and air a prime-time Christmas special set in the Playhouse. Although Reubens was committed to never “breaking the bit” in the ’80s, he recruited numerous gay/camp icons to be on the Xmas special.

Grace Jones on a prime time Xmas special.

In fact, the guest list has always struck any viewer who knows the score as a kind of gay honor roll: Little Richard, Cher, Grace Jones, k.d. lang, Joan Rivers, Dinah Shore, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, with a few other camp personages like Charo, Frankie and Annette, the Del Rubio Triplets, and Whoopi Goldberg. (The inclusion of Oprah and Magic Johnson has always been a matter of “What was going on there?”) 

The mug shot and the arrests It’s most interesting that the only time that Reubens drops out of the “narration” of the doc is when the chronology reaches his two arrests. According to intertitles, he never “completed” those interviews, but it appears like he said nothing about them, or Wolf chose not to use anything he might have said about them.

Thus, we are left with the many other talking heads holding forth on what it was like when the infamous goatee/long-haired mug shot appeared in the press and on TV, and when the second arrest accused Reubens of having pedophilic images in his house (which was a repository of kitsch artifacts, and also a very big collection of homoerotic magazines, films, and photos). 

Going back to the idea that Reubens can be said to the “co-director” of the film by guiding Wolf along certain pathways, it is most interesting (and definitely the saddest moment in the film) when we hear a final audio recording of Reubens (sounding much, much older and obviously far sicker) talking about how he did not want the label of pedophile to be part of his legacy. (He was cleared of the charge, legally — his lawyers had him take a plea for possession of a lot of porn, which is hardly a crime, but it was something to get the enterprising DA of L.A. off his back.) 

An early mugshot found online.
(This arrest not mentioned in the doc.)

He clearly left that bit of audio as the crux of his reflections on himself and his life — and thus Wolf has a beautifully poignant end to his portrait of Reubens. UPDATE: A newly uploaded article by Wolf notes that Reubens' publicist informed him that "Paul recorded something for you the night before he died." (The sarcastic sprite that was Pee-Wee was indeed the guiding hand behind the film.) 

Sidebar: Will the Morrissey movies soon be available again? One side-note for Warhol/Morrissey fans: Wolf was able to include brief clips from Trash and Women in Revolt as an example of the kind of underground film that Reubens wanted to be a part of, and was for a time in L.A. in the ’70s. Women is owned by the Warhol Estate, but Trash is totally owned by Morrissey’s estate (which, one presumes, is his family).

Joe Dallesandro revealed on Facebook a few years back that a documentary about his life and movie work was stalled indefinitely because Morrissey was refusing the filmmakers the right to include scenes from Little Joe’s work for Morrissey (who made a deal with the Warhol Estate to outright own Flesh, Trash, and Heat). The inclusion here of footage from Trash, with an acknowledgment to Morrissey himself (the filmmaker died in Oct of 2024), hopefully means that his films will come back into print on disc and will be allowed to be used in documentaries from now on. 

Why not a Reubens museum of kitsch and camp? On the whole, the documentary is both informative and wonderfully invigorating, especially when Reubens gets all Pee-Wee on Wolf and goes into verbal gymnastics and charming looks straight into the camera while writing Wolf off. The one question that remains, though, is what has happened to Reubens’ collection of kitsch and pop culture ephemera. 

One very tiny corner of the collection.

We see the collection being taken into a storage area that is the size of a warehouse, presumably after Reubens’ death on July 30, 2023. But where has all this stuff wound up and will it simply be auctioned off by his heirs, or will someone consecrate a neat little museum to it? The latter is just a daydream of an old Pee-Wee fan (who knows that Reubens included looks at his crazy collection in various filmed interviews and contributed items to Pee-Wee’s wall of stuff in Big Adventure). But it could happen, couldn’t it? I mean it. No, I don't. I don’t know.… I don’t know if I’m kidding. Oh, I know. [smiles] It should.

Seemingly the present state of the collection.
(Screenshot from the documentary.)

2 x Huppert: Live in NYC

Isabelle Huppert loves to challenge herself. As I’ve noted several times before on this blog, her choice of film work has always involved her playing new types of characters while continuing her dual specialization of women on the brink of a breakdown and complex women who are often “closed off” emotionally with others (or downright brusque). She can, in effect, do no wrong onscreen. 

Onstage, she challenges herself by not only appearing in straightforward productions of classic works (none of which we see over here) but also starring in avant-garde productions and works by new playwrights. I have written about her last three appearances in plays in NYC here (The Maids), here (Phaedra(s)), and here (The Mother). In each case, as with this current item, her performances have been uniformly excellent while the material was flawed to one degree or another. 

Such was the case with her recent stint at NYU’s Skirball Hall doing a handful of performances of the high-energy, one-woman piece Mary Said What She Said — a play that is so rigidly (and familiarly) stylized that it seems like a parody of what some perceive “avant-garde theater” to be.

Mary is written by playwright Darryl Pinckney as a one-woman monologue delivered by Mary Stuart (1542-87), aka “Mary, Queen of Scots.” She moves through situations in her life (with the dialogue drawn from Mary’s own letters), providing a kind of emotional summing-up of her very active existence. One could do some research into her life before seeing the show and still be mystified, because we are given her POV on events, but they are shuffled throughout and what we mostly have are the traumatic highlights delivered in a cascade of verbiage.

The play is thus intended to just wash over the viewer, as Mary speaks very fast, then very slowly, then very fast again. She poses in tableau-like fashion on an empty but bright-white stage (later filled with fog that resembles clouds) and moves around in dance steps at other times. At points she speaks live onstage; at others we hear recordings of her voice (and recordings of a man and child, presumably her son, the future King James).

Perhaps Pinckney included some of the above in his script, but these stylistic inclusions would seem to be inspirations provided by the director, Robert Wilson is a Texan who made his name with Einstein on the Beach and has had his productions scored by cult rockers including Tom Waits and Lou Reed. (The score for Mary was written by Italian composer Ludovico Einaudi; his work was at its most memorable when it most resembled the work of Philip Glass.)

Mary was the fifth Wilson show I’ve seen (The Black Rider being the most memorable) and it’s best to come right out and say it: He’s a remarkably “familiar” director, meaning that his stylized sets, costumes, and behavioral tics for his actors seem fresh and new the first time you see them, but by the second time they lose their luster. By the third Wilson play you see, you begin to think you’re watching someone (as the Brits say) “taking the piss” out of the material by presenting some avant-garde techniques that he’s used several times before and others that were fashioned by others long before his career began.

So, with Mary we have a case where the stagecraft is a drawback, but the lead performer is exquisite. Huppert clearly loved Wilson and Pinckney’s “shifts” for her character, as she plays her at different ages and in different situations, all of it funneled through a continual recitation. She gives it her all and does a magnificent job of conveying Mary’s conflicting emotions and the many dangerous situations that her regal status has placed her in.

In the meantime, one thinks of Wilson’s preceding plays (“Yup, saw that in his Woyzeck adaptation.” “Oops, that’s on the verge of that kitsch insanity from POEtry.”) One also thinks of German Expressionist theater, just imbued with brighter primary colors. Here one thinks of the work that Beckett wrote for Billie Whitelaw, very specifically the monologue “Not I,” wherein Whitelaw had to deliver a text at top speed while the audience saw only her mouth. In other words, Mr. Wilson, (as friend Stephen puts it, per an old quip by Jerry Lewis), “we’ve seen the dress.”

One other difficulty plagued those who don’t know French (or, as in my case, can follow it when it’s spoken slowly): The surtitles provided at NYU’s Skirball Hall were in a gray type shown on a black background. (I was in a front upper balcony, center seat.) Given that the titles have to flash very quickly in the scenes where Mary is racing through a quick, frenzied torrent of words, one could only glaze over and just marvel at the brilliance that is Huppert, without giving a look at the dim, hard-to-read translations of what she was saying.

So, I’m still glad I saw the show despite the dreary repetition to be found in Wilson’s stagecraft (and the high price, given that the only lower-priced seats were “partial view” — lovely!), since every opportunity to see Huppert performing live should be pounced upon, as she is one of the finest actresses on the planet and is indeed eager to take on new challenges with every production.

*****

Huppert in basic black.
(Akin to her outfit at
L'Alliance; this photo
is available as a cardboard
standee (!) online.)

A quieter, calmer, less “produced” event featuring Huppert took place on March 3 at L’Alliance (formerly the French Institute Alliance Francaise). In this 90-minute presentation she read five stories by Guy de Maupassant. And again, it’s not like she needed to prove her bona fides as a hypnotic performer, but she was wonderful in a subdued set (a desk and chair combination, a music stand, and a chair and small side table). 

Here the words were everything and she did justice to them. (The readings were in French with very readable surtitles.) She read the stories directly from sheets of paper but was clearly familiar with them enough so that she could look up from the page at certain points, make gestures to underscore certain lines, act out unfinished exclamations, and at times sneak in a look at the audience to bring a certain point home.

The five stories she read were “The Confession,” “The Father,” “Simon’s Papa,” “The Jewels,” “The Necklace.” Maupassant was a master of the short story,  but the tales she read here did not all have twist endings of the sort that inspired later short story writers. In fact the first four stories were all slices of life that ended quite suddenly. It was only in “The Necklace” that the latter part of the story leads up to a very neat little twist at the end.

A 1974 telefilm
based on Maupassant
starring La Huppert.

This was certainly not a “show,” and it did not allow Huppert to show the range of her emotions in the way that Mary did. However, it was nice to see her in a more relaxed mood — even as she dazzled in Mary, it was still an exhausting piece to sit through. At the Maupassant reading, she was relaxed but still was able to draw the audience in through the tone of her voice and the above-mentioned gestures and movements. (She paced a bit back and forth between stories — perhaps excess energy left over from Mary?)

Whatever she is doing in the public eye, Huppert commits to at a very intense level. Thus, seeing her reading some classic fiction was a much simpler but very definite delight.

Note: All the Mary Said What She Said photos are © Lucie Jansch.

‘I’ve come to piss you off’: Deceased Artiste Bertrand Blier (Part 2 of two)

"My name is Bertie Blye.

"No, I’ve never stolen a car, or gone to prison, or abused Isabelle Huppert on the side of a road. 

"And yet I am the immortal author of Les Valseuses.

"I was born March 4, 1939, a good year, at Boulogne-Billancourt.

"My father was a good actor.

"Yes, he had an influence over me. As much as Boris Vian, James Cain, and Thelonious Monk.

"I am an old young director full of promise (Hitler, connais pas!).

"Sadly, I didn’t keep that promise (Calmos).

"And then, thanks to a group of friends and the flip of a wrist, I managed to pull myself together (Buffet Froid).

"You see how I can look at my work in a lucid way.

"If you ask me who are the best moviegoers in the world, I will tell you the Americans, because of a pretty little statue that sits in my library and that I caress once a day with a trembling hand. (Get Out Your Handkerchiefs)

"As to why my hand is trembling, I will let you guess. Sometimes it’s emotion.

"I am also the director of a film titled Beau-Père, the star of which has given us the slip. 

"The cinema is much more important than politics, believe me.” [Self-written bio, found on p. 160 in Blier, Pensées et répliques]

I ended the first part of this piece with a discussion of Too Beautiful for You (1989), which was a turning point in Blier’s work, as it saw him departing from the world he had depicted from the mid-Seventies on, in which he limned (and made fun of) sexist men and numb women, as well as curious ciphers who inhabited an absurdist universe. 

But just because his female characters became three-dimensional and one could feel genuine sympathy for them didn’t mean that Blier was abandoning his characteristic Theatre of the Absurd-ish situations and bizarre juxtapositions. He proved that brilliantly in the trio of films he made with actress Anouk Grinberg, who was his companion for most of the Nineties and the muse for his first films devoted to female protagonists.

Ad for the English translation of the novel
Going Places.

First, a word about his approach to filmmaking. One of the reasons I did 14 episodes about his films on the Funhouse TV show from the fall of 2021 to the spring of 2022 is that his work adhered to both the “high” and “low” sides of the material I cover. At first glance his films were sexual and appealed to the vulgar side of French farce; once one watches more than a few minutes of any of his films, though, it’s evident that a master storyteller was at work, who wanted to depict characters in certain situations, but never offered the easy (idiotic) answers you’d find in a simple sex farce.

He stated his goal in a 1988 quote: “From the beginning I try to identify strategies that will let me take the viewer by surprise. I’m particularly fond of using cliches and classic dramatic forms as my starting point. Then I completely reverse them. It upsets the emotional balance, shatters the cocoon of intellectual comfort in which spectators have hoped to bury themselves.” [1988 quote, cited in Harris, p. 20]

Blier and his wife,
actress Farida Rahouadj

Thus, the illogical universe that his characters inhabit may seem to indicate that the film is going out of control, but that universe is actually a careful construct through which Blier is up-ending any number of dramatic cliches. And there are no better examples of this than the first two films he made with Grinberg.

Sadly, though, U.S. distribution of foreign films got weaker in the Eighties and by the Nineties it reached new lows. Thus, of the eight films I about to discuss here — of which at least four are classic Blier, up there with his Seventies/Eighties best — only one (!) had U.S. theatrical distribution and two had DVD releases (with one other being released only on VHS).

Thus, some of Blier’s best work has never been seen by American cinephiles. And thus the image of him as a “misogynist” filmmaker was made even greater, as very few American viewers have seen the mature Blier. (His age when making these last eight films spans from 52 to 80!)

One of the great examples of this mature approach was his first female-centric film, Merci La Vie (1991). He said about the picture and its follow-up Un deux trois soleil, “I’ve begun my second career. I’ve invested more of myself in these last two films.” [1993 quote, cited in Harris, p. 130]

Merci is one of Blier’s greatest achievements, in that it does open up a new period in his work while also visually “quoting” his earlier works. It also is one of his most extreme experiments with temporal and spatial displacement, as we jump backwards and forwards in time and in and out of fiction. These “jumps” are indicated to the viewer via a series of differently colored sequences, as the film is in color, b&w, and monochrome depending on the environment or time period that we’re in. 

This sounds like it could be quite confusing, but Blier makes it easier to follow by giving us two lead characters who become the female equivalents of the two antiheroes in Les Valseuses (1974). In that case both of the men were charming but dumb; here the women are smarter, as Joëlle is a troublemaker (Anouk Grinberg) and the other, Camille (Charlotte Gainsbourg), is a younger student who is the more logical and less impetuous of the two. We follow them from adventure to adventure and eventually get to know them quite well.

The film’s time periods come about as a result of Camille studying for her finals about the subject of WWII and the fact that a film is being made about WWII that the two women wander into (and Joëlle becomes the star of). But is it really a film, or is it actually a different life for Joëlle, who apparently underwent a medical experiment without her knowledge: she was given a venereal disease by a crafty doctor (Depardieu) who wants to see its effects on the local male population. 

Again, when recounted in print, the plot doesn’t make much sense, but Blier was indeed a master of absurdism and so there is an inherent logic to the illogic we see. What is going on is that Blier is not only showing his two female leads bonding and protecting each other from harm; he is also making a subtle and stinging commentary on the then-current AIDS crisis, likening it to the Holocaust.

Blier addressed the changes in time and space by noting that Merci was “a channel-hopper’s film. That’s what it’s about. You zap, and suddenly it’s in black and white, it’s a war film…. Kids are great at it, they can even put on a cassette and call someone at the same time. It’s like gymnastics for viewers….” [1991 quote, cited in Harris on pp. 134-35.]

The thing that makes the film so special, though, is not the flow of events the women move though, but the fact that they are emotionally appealing characters. Camille cares much about her father (as Charlotte did with Serge Gainsbourg in real life) and Joëlle confesses her fear of dying young from the disease she’s been poisoned with. Merci is in fact such a special creation because of this counterpoint between an utterly absurd sequence of events and two deeply felt (and extremely well acted) lead characters.

The film is compelling from its opening image: Joëlle being smacked and left behind on a road in a wedding gown by her boyfriend, who drives away. Camille finds her and puts her in a shopping cart (a blatant reference to the opening of Les Valseuses) and tries to protect her throughout the rest of the film. (This is reinforced by the women’s height differential — Camille is taller and also has more common sense than Joëlle, so she comes off as an “older sister,” despite being years younger.)

The self-referential aspect seen in earlier Blier films reaches full flower here. The characters make references to the soundtrack music and the fact that they are in flashbacks. One particularly bizarre moment in the WWII plot finds Camille saying she might die, and her father (played as a younger man by Michel Blanc) notes that she can’t die, she hasn’t been born yet.

Then, in the weirdest twist, Depardieu’s doctor character urges the father to use a condom if he has sex with Joëlle. To which the father responds with a shout (after the characters have been nearly bombed by the Germans), “What period are we in, anyway? If there’s AIDS, there’s no Boches [Germans]. If there’s Boches, there’s no AIDS, and we can screw!”

Thus, Merci is not just a transitional work by Blier but an exceptionally weird and funny comedy with an undertone of longing for the past and sadness for the victims of both 20th-century nightmares. Camille’s love of her dad eventually comes to mirror Bertrand’s feelings for his father Bernard (who died shortly before he made the film); her father (as an old man, played by Jean Carmet) gives her a speech about being typecast in the acting profession and wishing he had been a “great actor.” “The plot never revolves around me… the best I can hope for now is to die playing a small part.” Clearly, this speech was built out of things that Bernard Blier said to his son as he got older.

Hopefully, someday Merci will get the cult it so richly deserves. It was hated by the critics in France, but it never even received U.S. theatrical distribution and was never released on any home-entertainment format. 

The next film continued Blier’s maturation as a filmmaker. Un deux trois soleil (aka One, two, three, freeze, 1993) received no distribution but thankfully did have a DVD release for a short time. At points he identified the film as “the most personal” of all his works. This is a fascinating statement, given that the film presents the life of a young woman, as we witness her moving through moments of her childhood, teenage years, and adulthood all in the same spaces (a housing project in Marseilles). 

As in Merci, Anouk Grinberg gives a terrific performance here, incarnating the heroine at different ages, with the jumps in time occurring suddenly. Her character is wistful, as she struggles with her overbearing mother (Myriam Boyer, Serie noire), memories of a boyfriend (Olivier Martinez) who died as a teenager, and pleading with her alcoholic father (Marcello Mastroianni) to give up booze. 

The above might indicate that the film is a melodrama; it is not. There are many great comedic moments, all of them utterly absurd, and a few of the plot threads weave in an element that was new to Blier’s work, namely magical realism. Her boyfriend is labelled as dead from the first, but during the events of the film her parents both die and reappear to her, driving her as nuts in their post-death incarnations as they did in life.

Blier spoke about the new approach seen in this film: “After a dozen years, I have the impression of being able to make dense and develop themes in a very personal way, freed from the classic structure of the first films.” [Predal, jeune cinema] 

In addition to the comedy there are genuinely moving moments, many of which have to do with the father character. Blier was clearly still haunted by his father’s death, and so he created an Italian father to stand in for his French father, who was an Italo-phile. Mastroianni is absolutely perfect in the role (again showing that, as an actor, he got better and better throughout his career), as his character is to be seen as both a drunken sot (who keeps wandering into the wrong apartments in the housing complex, mistaking Black families for his own) and a man who longs terribly to go back to Italy. 

One of the images that sums up the film best concerns the father: He is pranked by two teens from the apartment complex who keep appearing in his path carrying around a door for him to go through, with his correct apartment number on it. The final use of this door is absolutely moving and truly is one of the most unabashedly and beautifully sentimental moments in Blier’s cinema.

The film never was distributed in the U.S. (It did play at MoMA, where I saw Blier and Grinberg do an introduction.) Thus, there was no recognition in America of Blier’s stepping away from the more controversial “vulgar” themes found in some of his Seventies and Eighties work. What was noted by foreign critics who did see the film, though, was that Blier was finally including Black characters in his film and in Soleil is openly commenting on the manner in which poor families are huddled together in housing projects. (Though he does show the family units to be quite solid and nurturing — something Grinberg’s character has never had, thus a Black woman who becomes her surrogate mother.)

The critics clearly had misinterpreted Blier’s messages about society — his depictions of sexist characters found him branded Right-wing, but he was personally Left-leaning. When asked about it, he said,“... I believe that my films — me, perhaps not, but them, yes — are left-wing. Apart from Too Beautiful for You, where they are gentrified, all my heroes are from the wrong side of the street: thugs, lost people….” [Murat, Telerama]

Like Merci, Soleil deserves an audience. One can only hope that a programmer (or perhaps a prone-to-homages filmmaker like Wes Anderson) will move it out of the shadows and it will finally be seen as one of Blier’s best, most layered works. 

Blier’s last film starring Anouk Grinberg was Mon Homme (aka My Man, 1996). This film did get a distribution deal in the U.S. and appeared on VHS (via Artificial Eye and New Yorker). It is an excellent comedy but isn’t as groundbreaking as its predecessors. 

Here we find Grinberg playing a hooker who takes her work seriously (with one of her johns being played by New Wave icon Jean-Pierre Leaud!) and who decides to take a big, bizarre step when she takes pity on a homeless man (Gérard Lanvin) and then makes him her pimp. He stays in that role, collecting her money, but then cheats on her with a woman (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who doesn’t want to be a hooker, so he keeps seeing her (and spending money on her) as a mistress. 

Blier had an interesting reaction to Mon Homme in later years. He said, “Mon Homme, this is my hardest film. The hardest. I don't claim it too much. There are times when we go too far... and there, I went there! I don't claim all my films, you know. Not Calmos, nor Mon Homme, nor My Friend's Girl. But I like Merci la vie and Un deux trois soleil….” [Murat, Telerama]

The film may have been a difficult one for Blier in terms of his scripting or perhaps his relationship with his star (this was their last film together). But it is a perfectly entertaining dark comedy that has some sexy moments and continues Blier’s run of films with complex female characters.

And it does boast one of the most interesting juxtapositions of music in any modern film. On its soundtrack can be heard the emotional, religious compositions of Henryk Gorecki and the sensual, earthy songs of Mr. Barry White. 

With the turning of the century Blier’s films disappeared from America’s movie screens entirely (although one of the films did get a brief DVD release; see below). The first movie in the run of five movies that went under the radar over here was Les Acteurs (aka Actors, 2000). The film circulated among English-speaking collectors as a bootleg from a subtitled version that aired on the SBS Channel in Australia.

Acteurs is Blier returning whole-heartedly to Theater of the Absurd comedy, with a who’s who of French actors “of a certain age” musing about their lives and careers, and the fact that they’re getting fewer roles as they grow older. We follow an initial group of them (André Dussollier, Jean-Pierre Marielle, Jacques Villeret) who find themselves in a restaurant, unsure of their lines. The initial group then wanders (in classic Blier style) through Paris, meeting different colleagues as they move on. 

The line-up of familiar faces is incredible, with Blier focusing most attention on the character people and a few superstars showing up in different guises: Depardieu crashes his motorcycle into a billboard near the group; Belmondo is a homeless version of himself (who gets a great death scene as jazz appears on the soundtrack); and Delon is shooting some kind of thriller (and says about himself “I’m a silent sort of guy, with a silent sort of face...”), but then points out the empty chairs on set (“you should always have a chair for a friend who may drop in, a chair with his name...”) emblazoned with the names of two great dead French stars (Jean Gabin, Lino Ventura). He then names others who need chairs (Bourvil, Louis de Funes, Simone Signoret, and Yves Montand).

One of the more surprising scenes for fans of French film who may not have been following the private lives of the stars involves Jean-Claude Brialy, a great star of the Sixties and Seventies. Brialy had come out as gay in his later life and allowed Blier to write a humorous scene related to this fact — but in the scene Brialy retains his dignity and reminds the other actor about Brialy’s place in cinema as a star in the films of the French New Wave.

Blier did also include two women in the parade of performers: Josiane Balasko (who claims to be André Dussollier) and Maria Schneider, whom he gifted with a nice monologue. At its end, she says, “I’m Maria Schneider. This scene has been good for me.” 

Blier and only *some* of his actor friends.

He referred to his cast in an interview as “an entire orchestra” and talked about how he conceived of the film (and its eventual failure at the box office): “...there, it was the public who did not want to get involved in the game, in this series of jokes and pleasantries in which the actors participated cheerfully. 

“I wrote with the phone next to me, and as soon as I came up with a scene for an actor, I called him. Each time, I gave that actor the names of those who had already accepted before him, and in that fashion I finally got everyone, with a snowball effect. The problem is that there should have been others, but the budget suffered drastic cuts, which forced me to reduce my ambitions, and I had to give up scenes involving younger actors. But the scenario was shot exactly as it was written.” [Predal, jeune cinema]

One watches the film wondering what set it in motion for Blier. That is revealed in the very last scene, in which the actor Claude Brasseur acts out a scene with a gun in a rainstorm. He is interrupted when he receives a cellphone call, which turns out to be from his dead dad, the great French actor Pierre Brasseur (Children of Paradise). Blier is revealed to be the director of the film; he and the crew watch Claude talk to his father. Claude soon turns back to Bertrand, saying his father is “with a pal who’d like to talk to you.” 

Bertrand takes the cellphone and begins a conversation with his father Bernard. He makes small talk and explains the film he’s making is about actors. He then responds to an unheard question, “Of course I think about you. Every day. In fact, as time goes on, I miss you even more.” [cut to credits]

This finale is about as personal as Blier’s art ever got. No more “stand-in” characters for his father, just Bertrand lamenting his death on film, at the end of his own meditation about older actors who are getting fewer lines, less calls with work, and have no idea which way to go with their lives. And, again, I note this is a thoroughly enjoyable and moving work that was never, ever seen by American viewers. 

The next film by Blier is probably my least favorite, but that doesn’t mean it’s bad. It’s just that the first half or so is directly adapted from a play that Blier wrote, which reportedly ran for two years in Paris. And, surprisingly, given that many of his films contain scenes (or entire portions of the film) that could be called “stagey” (read: two-character scenes in confined environments), Les Côtelettes (aka The cutlets, 2003), which was actually a play, comes off as a more “limited” offering, although the second half in which the film opens up is a lot more engaging.

The plot revolves around two pompous older men (Philippe Noiret and Michel Bouquet) who both fall in love with the same woman — namely the woman (Farida Rahouadj, Blier’s last wife) who works as a maid for one of them. Bouquet visits Noiret at the very beginning and notes he’s there specifically “to piss you off” (a classic Blier line). Soon, the men become embroiled in the triangle, which one can easily see as a kind of allegory for colonialism.

The film moves back to the world of Seventies Blier when the character of “Death,” depicted as an older woman (Catherine Hiegel), appears and says she is going to claim the maid. The two men end up attempting to stave the Grim Reaper off by screwing her in the hospital where their beloved is slowly dying – until there’s a musical number and the whole film goes wildly out of control. (And this time the out-of-control sequence is well-designed and performed, unlike the bizarre end of Calmos in which our antiheroes end up in a rather cheap-looking simulation of a vagina.) 

The “second career” of Blier reached a latter-day high point with the funny and characteristically bizarre How Much Do You Love Me? (2005), which was out briefly on DVD from Strand (with no theatrical release in the U.S. beforehand). The film is a densely plotted farce, which, again, is as good as anything Blier made in the Seventies and Eighties but was barely seen by American viewers.

Its initial premise is that a schnook (Bernard Campan) gets a beautiful hooker (Monica Bellucci) to live with him by convincing her that he is a lottery winner. The schnook is revealed to have a heart condition by his doctor friend (Jean-Pierre Darroussin), who warns the hooker that she might kill him with vigorous sex. The hooker eventually disappears, and the schnook learns that she is the wife of a gangster (Depardieu), who offers to let the schnook have her for a certain sum of money (equal to his lottery winnings). That’s when it comes out that our antihero was lying and that he never won the lottery, and complications pile up. 

How Much is a beautifully stylized comedy with urban late-night landscapes, beautiful camera movement, and eye-catching set design. It shows just how vibrant and amusing Blier’s scripting can be and contains two scene-stealing moments, from doctor Darroussin, who delivers a touching monologue about a nurse he one loved, and neighbor Farida Rahouadj, who instructs the schnook and the hooker in how truly great sex should sound.

It also contains one of those memorably un-p.c. lines that made critics who gave only a cursory glance to his films the notion that he was a misogynist. The line in question? “Asses are meant to be touched. This is France!”

The last Blier masterwork is Le bruit des glaçons (aka The Clink of Ice, 2010). It’s not at all subtle but is wonderfully scripted and presents us with an absurdist scenario that is both very funny and quite moving at points. 

In an interview Blier spoke very eloquently about it. He called it “...my purest film. It's probably due to my age, to maturity. And more than the cancer plotline, it was for the love scenes between Anne Alvaro and Jean Dujardin that I shot the film…. When you have an incurable brain tumor, the fulfillment of the life you have left passes by necessity through the arms of a woman. We are looking for the one who will close your eyes, and it is not always the one we expect who does it.” [Murat, Telerama] 

The plot is beautifully fashioned. It concerns an alcoholic author (Jean Dujardin, The Artist and the brilliant, unseen-in-the-U.S. J’Accuse by Polanski) who receives a visit one day from a gentleman (Albert Dupontel) who claims that the author is dying and that he is the author’s cancer. The author’s Russian mistress can’t see his cancer and neither can his devoted maid (Anna Alvaro, Danton).

As the film moves on, the author argues with his cancer (in the classic manner of Blier’s comedy team leads) and eventually falls in love with the only one who truly cares about him, the maid. However, the maid has received a caller as well — a woman (Myriam Boyer) who claims that she is her cancer. She is not as well dressed and articulate as the author’s cancer, but that is because she represents “the cancer of the employed,” not the “cancer of the bosses.”

The film grows in bizarre activity until a scene in which the lives of author and the maid are threatened by crooks who break into the house, and thus comes a surprisingly upbeat ending. At that point we hear the stirring and beautiful rendition of Brel’s “Ne Me Quitte Pas” by Nina Simone; other music heard in the film is composed by Ravel, Handel, Schumann, Leonard Cohen, and Felix Leclerc (a terrific song by a singer-songwriter unknown in the U.S.).

Dujardin and Dupontel are great as the lead male characters, but Alvaro truly shines as the maid. She won a Cesar for her performance. 

The Maid (Anna Alvaro) and her "cancer"
(Myriam Boyer).

Glaçons returned to one of Blier’s favorite techniques, direct address to the viewer. He noted that “…in silent cinema, Chaplin did it. And if Chaplin did it, why not me?… In Le bruit des glaçons, it seemed essential to me. All the characters contemplate their death. Except cancer, who doesn't need to...”

And while Glaçons is Blier’s last masterwork, his final film, Convoi exceptionnel (aka Heavy Duty) (2019) is an enjoyable farce that returns to elements contained in his previous films. First of all is a shopping cart: Les Valseuses began with Depardieu in a shopping cart being pushed by Dewaere; in the opening of Merci La Vie Charlotte Gainsbourg pushes Anouk Grinberg in a shopping cart after she finds her unconscious by the side of a road; Convoi begins with Depardieu as a homeless man pushing a shopping cart with his possessions in it.

Note the shopping cart. (A symbol of Blier's
"wandering" characters.)

There are twists and turns in the plot, most of them heavy on the meta side. The film begins with homeless Depardieu meeting a wealthy-looking man (Christian Clavier) on the street. The wealthy man tells Gerard that they must hurry, as they have to kill a man. Why? “It’s in the script,” says Clavier, beginning a thread that runs throughout most of the film. 

Clavier is aware they’re operating from a script whereas Depardieu isn’t, until he is told. Then a further complication: new pages of the script are appearing with alarming frequency and neither man knows what he’s supposed to be doing. They wind up confronting the writers in their office and we learn then that what they’re involved in is seemingly a TV series (as the woman in charge is called a “show runner”). 

By this point Blier aficionados will recognize that the filmmaker is quoting his own work, as he was wont to do over the years. The notion of older men “losing their lines” and thus their direction in life appeared in Actors, and the inevitable obligatory killing hails from Buffet Froid.

As the rest of the film unfolds, we see the plot being constructed in front of us. First, there’s a woman (Farida Rahouadj) they meet who tells a sad story about her childhood, proving that, while these people might just be characters in a drama of some kind, they do have specific memories. 

Depardieu and Clavier then realize they have to kill Rahouadj, but once they do, the entire movie shifts gears — Depardieu’s long-lost girlfriend shows up and Clavier is left by his wife. The final movement of the film finds the two men’s lives completely flipped: Now Clavier is homeless and Depardieu is rich, living off the wealth of his 90-year-old wife.

Toward the end of the film the two leads talk a lot about food and how it should be prepared. One wonders why this discussion is so long, but by this time it was very clear that one of Depardieu’s main real-life addictions is food, so one gets the impression he didn’t actually need Blier’s lines to keep the scene going for as long as it does. It in fact serves another purpose, preparing us for a very sudden punchline to the film. 

The finale of Convoi might be sudden and perhaps not the “final statement” that one would’ve wished for from Blier, but early on he gives us another one of his flawless discussions, this time about art and death. 

In the latter half of the film, Depardieu and his girlfriend encounter a homeless man who turns out to be a film producer whose films all failed. He asks Depardieu if he knows “the difference between life and the movies.” He explains, “In life you die. In the movies, you never die. Never. For example, Mastroianni will never die.” 

Convoi may not be one of the “great last films” of a great filmmaker, but it does entertain and it places Blier’s absurdist universe into the current moment. And no, neither he nor his characters will ever really die. 

*****

Note: Thanks to friends Paul Gallagher and M. Faust for copies of the films. Thanks also to J-M Gregoire for references and translation, and Leonard Stoehr for inspiration.

Bibliography:
Blier, Bertrand, Going Places, J.B. Lippincott Company, 1974
Blier Bertrand, Pensées et répliques, le cherche midi, 2001, 2015
Harris, Sue, Bertrand Blier, Manchester University Press, 2001
Murat, Pierre, “Bertrand Blier en 2010 dans “Télérama” : “Pour moi, il n’y a plus de cinéma.” Telerama.
Predal, Rene, “Rencontre avec Bertrand Blier.” jeune cinéma, n°281, avril 2003