GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS Movie Review

Preparez Vous Mouchoirs

While he isn't a surrealist in the same league as Luis Buñuel, Bertrand Blier took upon himself in the 1970s the task of shaking much of the movie world—particularly the French movie world—out of its perceived stagnation. His 1974 debut. Going Places, was a violent, funny, and highly controversial vision that caused a sensation in France but left American viewers colder than the movie's thug protagonists. But his 1978 Get Out Your Handkerchiefs—the story of a beautiful, listless woman whose husband procures lovers for her to cheer her up—was not only a smash on the American art house circuit, it won an Academy Award as the Best Foreign Language Film of that year. Dan Quayle wasn't yet in a position to deliver a nationally televised tirade against the highly unconventional family structure that Get Out Your Handkerchiefs fades out on, but if he went to French movies in 1978 (care to bet?) he would not have been pleased. Gérard Depardieu is at his most goofily endearing as the husband who only wants to be a good provider, and Patrick Dewaere is characteristically superb as the first lover Depardieu selects for his down-in-the-mouth wife. Carol Laure has the toughest job, having to retain our interest while impersonating a zombielike knitting machine for most of the picture, but she's so intoxicatingly beautiful that Blier is able to get away with keeping her on screen as much as he does. Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, like all of Blier's best work, is designed to provoke, infuriate, and dare us not to laugh. The most delicate of terrorists, Blier turns the safety of our prejudices upside down and then dares to ask: what's wrong with this picture?

NEXT STOP … Going Places, Beau Père, Too Beautiful for You

1978 (R) 109m/C FR Gerard Depardieu, Patrick Dewaere, Carole Laure; D: Bertrand Blier; W: Bertrand Blier; C: Jean Penzer; M: Georges Delerue. Academy Awards ‘78: Best Foreign Film; Cesar Awards ‘79: Best Score; National Society of Film Critics Awards ‘78: Best Film. VHS, LV WAR, INT