He was one of the biggest names in French cinema, but also one of the most subversive. Bertrand Blier, the “French director with particularly provocative work”, according to The Guardian, died Monday January 20, in Paris, at the age of 85. The filmmaker had “signed his greatest successes in the 1970s and 1980s with a series of scandalous films, many of them with Gérard Depardieu, which sought to reveal the wounds of the macho male”, recalls the British newspaper.
It was in March 1974, with the release of the film The Valseuses – “slang expression to designate the testicles”, explains the London daily –, that Bertrand Blier acquired his “reputation as a director who shocks the bourgeoisie”. The film – revealing Gérard Depardieu, Patrick Dewaere and Miou-Miou – and “which contains several scenes of rape and sexual assault” was quickly “became cult, before being the subject, in recent years, of numerous denunciations”.
The release of the film, in the last months of Georges Pompidou's France, had “caused a cultural earthquake whose aftershocks are still felt”, comments Time. The Swiss newspaper, which describes the filmmaker as a “man of letters and images” and a “incorrigible anar[[
France
