The Élysée paid tribute to director Bertrand Blier, who died Monday at the age of 85. The Presidency of the Republic describes him as a “giant of French cinema”. Director of “Buffet Froid”, “Tenue de soir” or “Les Valseuses”, Bertrand Blier “left his free and scathing mark on our national imagination for five decades”, write Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron in a press release published this Wednesday.
“With his irony, his provocative use of words, his uncomfortably free gaze, he offered our imagination films that have become legendary,” they added. “He belonged to the great French tradition of painters of temperaments, between misanthropy and tenderness. »
Bertrand Blier, author of cult and provocative films in the 1970s and 1980s, made the heyday of Gérard Depardieu, Michel Blanc and Miou-Miou. Some of his works were great popular successes and his death turns a page in the history of cinema before MeToo, the movement to free speech on sexual and gender-based violence.
A ceremony open to the public will be organized on Wednesday January 29 at 10:30 a.m. in the Saint-Roch church, in Paris, which is traditionally the church of entertainment personalities, with its Artists' Chaplaincy. It will be followed by a private burial in the Montmartre cemetery, his son Léonard announced to AFP (Agence France presse).
-Non-conformist and irreverent for some, provocative and symbol of another time for others, the name of Blier will remain especially associated with that of Gérard Depardieu, whose career he launched in 1974 in “Les Valseuses”, alongside Patrick Dewaere and Miou-Miou. A subversive film that has become cult, “Les Valseuses” is also marked by a gritty humor that was shocking at the time. It is in this film that Depardieu unleashes this tirade: “Are we not well? Peaceful, cool, relaxed from the glans. And we’ll get hard when we want to get hard.”
His work today comes under criticism for its misogyny or the way in which it depicts male domination. In recent years, some of his actresses like Miou-Miou or Brigitte Fossey have described having sometimes suffered his gritty humor as a humiliation or an attack. Director of around thirty films, Blier will remain as a popular filmmaker, who could bring together six million spectators in the 1970s with “Les Valseuses” and another three million in the 1980s with “Tenue de Soirée”, where Depardieu and Miou -Miou is filming this time with Michel Blanc.
