After #MeToo, is Bertrand Blier's work unwatchable?

Sabine Prokhoris is a normalienne, associate professor of philosophy and psychoanalyst. She is notably the author of Le Mirage #MeToo(ed. du Cherche midi, October 2021), and Who’s Afraid of Roman Polanski? (Le Cherche midi, 2024).

“Misogynistic, obscene,…” There is no shortage of derogatory terms to designate the cinema of Bertrand Blier, in the current press as in that which was contemporary with his films. Do you consider them relevant to describe his work?

They say Bertrand Blier is unwatchable afterwards #MeToo . But forgetting that the counterpart of Waltzes is an analogous film, Thank you lifewith two totally crazy women as heroines, driven by incredible energy, played by Charlotte Gainsbourg and Anouk Grinberg. Blier provokes, he plays dark jokes, pushes the line to the point of absurdity, with at the same time a lot of emotional modesty: look Too beautiful for you. View films through the lens of misogyny or «morale» certainly does not seem to me to be a relevant angle from which to approach his cinema – or any work of art for that matter. There is derision, assumed bad taste, and it comes from a genre: black farce. It’s a very dark relationship with humans.

More than misogyny, moreover, we could speak of a sort of misanthropic rage, mixed with creative cheerfulness. That of “better to laugh about it” (of human tragedy and smallness). This sense of derision evokes in certain films what Philip Roth says about the character in his novel Sabbath Theater : “He is the man agitated by instinctive turbulence behind man: the unmanageable man, the man not exempt from sin – better still: the refractory man.” More “refractory” also in the sense of what is “capable of withstanding very high temperatures”. In other words, to live.

What explains the fact that it is increasingly difficult to watch some of his films?

The answer is in a sentence of The Joke by Milan Kundera, who also characterizes our time: “The healthy mind stinks of bullshit”. And it's tragic. We are immersed in a spirit of blinkered seriousness, of good militant feelings, which prevents a distanced relationship from reality, and deprives us of all lucidity.

And then Blier takes the clichés in reverse, explodes them by pushing them to the limit. See Too beautiful for youbut also, in another way, the excess of Waltzes. It makes us think about our relationship with them, and also about the fear and pain of disillusionment.

No illusion about the human in this cinema, but an obvious taste for play, and a tenderness which shows through an ultimately rather modest representation of human emotions.

So Blier apostle of “rape culture” ? Aggregators of letters considered that reading Ronsard could “traumatize” the students because his poems would advocate rape… In such a victimized vision of women, we track misogyny everywhere, just as the devout track blasphemy.

Bertrand Blier himself said that today he could no longer make a film like The Valseuses . For what reason?

Awareness (ironic?) of the self-censorship required of artists? I remember that at the time my feminist friends and I laughed a lot at this film. This is not a film that takes itself seriously and sells you marshmallows. It is in the same spirit that Watch out for the gorilla of Brassens and the priapic festivals in the Greco-Roman world: it's comical.

This way of showing off your muscles “male” (and to want to be “relaxed glans) at Blier (I always talk here about Waltzes), it is also undoubtedly the other side of the fear of fiasco in male sexuality, exacerbated, inevitably, by the sexual revolution of the 1970s. A deep concern offset by a ridiculous headlong rush. Moreover, in this film, the characters are desperate not to be able to make Miou-Miou cum. In other words, seen from the male side, said sexual liberation increases the threat of impotence.

Blier takes his own era head on, caricaturing it. But any caricature can and wants to shock and, as Philip Roth says, “forces one to view a familiar subject in an unpleasant or unusual light”.

Can it be enlightening to compare Blier's work to that of other authors?

Well Philip Roth for example, or Milan Kundera, and others. I think of the Roth novel to which I was referring, The Sabbath Theater, so scandalous, and so profoundly human. Roth has been accused of misogyny, which reveals the contemporary inability to read the farcical, outrageous dimension, which precisely ensures a grip on reality in all its crudeness, in an almost fantastic vein.

This inability of the spectator to move freely in the fictional space is the corollary of a very worrying derealization, much more than the most “shocking” of the 1970s. Everything, in a work that does not conform to the ideological injunctions of the moment, is taken literally, but conversely reality is denied. And we could observe that the #MeToo feminists had the ” trauma “ selective: Blier, or The Last Tango in Paris (initially imagined for Brando and… a young man), it’s “violence against women”. But the collective “We will live” on the sexual violence of October 7 is excluded from the feminist marches. Look for the error.