Bertrand Blier left us at the age of 85.
And this, a few days after one of his mentors – although his career was later – namely the American David Lynch. Author of absurd comedies, willingly familiar with the tragicomic, of surrealist works deployed as odes to the actors (the entire French cast of the 70s/80s appeared there, one film after the other), the son of Bernard Blier also leaves behind him an imagination tinged with scandals, controversies, stubborn polemics.
And the biggest is the one that has never ceased to cover his best-known film, but above all the most divisive: Les valseuses, wanderings in France in the seventies of two sexually obsessed madmen. Film of which a sequence more precisely is fished out today.
And shock. Maybe more than yesterday…
A traumatic sequence which glorifies sexual violence? This scene from Les Valseuses which scandalizes
This scene from Les Valseuses features the two protagonists, in other words the characters of Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, undressing and touching the chest of a train passenger, played by Brigitte Fossey. Bared chest, touched, with hands, but not only. The passenger is in a state of astonishment.
Last year, one of the most important voices already spoke on this stage: Brigitte Fossey herself! Now aged 77, the actress from La boum then denounced a sequence of sexual harassment, if not sexual assault. While the filmmaker's gaze that is given to him seems to aim to express a form of desire.
Brigitte Fossey testifies: “I don't want to see that, it's not my age. I can't see that because it's an attack. When a girl is troubled she is vulnerable, she cannot fight. Besides, there would be no point in fighting because there are two very strong people who can beat him up and do what they want.“.
-And it’s on another stage today that the voices are getting heated.
On the set of BFM TV, the president of the feminist association and movement #MeTooMedia, which aims to denounce sexual violence in the media, was indignant, shortly after the announced death of Bertrand Blier: “I have always refused to see this film precisely because of the role given to women in this film. The rapes and sexual assaults in Les valseuses are completely minimized“.
“This is a film that legitimizes rape culture!“
The feminist activist also says she is disturbed by the success of the film, which has become cult. The feminist expression “rape culture”, of academic and activist origin, designates the euphemization of sexual violence in our society, and the way in which popular culture contributes to denying their nature, or trivializing them.
A subversive film, that's for sure, a sickening film for some, and a train sequence which was already widely shocking at the time, about which Brigitte Fossey also said this: “It's a scene about trouble, and I don't know a single girl who hasn't been troubled at some point by the inappropriate gesture of an older man.“.
But does Les Valseuses really attribute to its two protagonists an aura of heroes, which would legitimize their actions? Isn't it the other way around? And doesn't he denounce precisely what he tries to put into images, deliberately disturbing images? Should we really see an ode in this portrait of two macho and unsympathetic men?
Murielle Joudet, film critic, suggests it on France Culture, questioning Bertrand Blier's speech: “What makes it a great film is that it is always two things at once. He is misogynist and feminist, violent and tender… It is the strength of the film to start a scene on one tone and end it on another“.
