the last lights of a “pleasure cinema”

The filmmaker of “Valseuses” and “Buffetfroid” was 85 years old. He leaves a rich but contrasting legacy, affected by the affairs which affected his favorite actor, Gérard Depardieu.

The death of Bertrand Blier, a few days after that of David Lynch, is cruel in that it underlines the gap in the memory left by these two filmmakers of the dreamy and the morbid. As much as the last breath of the wick smoker signaled the brutal end of a work which never ceased to oxygenate until the end (the sparkling season 3 of “Twin Peaks”), so did the decline of the great phlegmatic support has been in evidence for decades. Carried by a Depardieu-Clavier duo at the end of the track, “Exceptional Convoy”, his final feature film released in 2018, was more of a simple jolt than a last stand. Whether we love him unreservedly or not, Bertrand Blier was undoubtedly a man of the past.

Son of Bernard, a recurring face of popular French cinema since the 1930s, Bertrand Blier established himself from “Valseuses” (his third film, released in 1974), as the chief portraitist of the baby boomer generation, chronicling their post-sixty-eight peregrinations over two golden decades. One scene sums up the affair, at least, gives an impetus, a direction: Depardieu, Miou-Miou and Dewaere wandering aboard a DS, …