GOING PLACES Movie Review

Les Valseuses
Making It

Bertrand Blier's portrait of a pair of petty, sadistic thugs remains a source of controversy a quarter-century after its release. Blier adapted his own novel for the screen, and gave the leads to virtual unknowns Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere—one wonders what might have happened to Blier's career without that inspired bit of casting. Going Places was something of a hipness/litmus test when it was released; if you found these bullying rapists and thieves sympathetic and funny, you were in the vanguard. Not to do so made you something of a cinematic reactionary, or worse yet, someone who “didn't get it.” It's a male fantasy, right? So it's OK. In fact, it's more than OK. It's art! I maintain, however, that it is possible to both “get it” and “not like it.” Just because Going Places is calculated to provoke bourgeois outrage doesn't mean that you're necessarily an imperialist running dog if you don't think Jeanne Moreau shooting herself in the vagina is a riot. (Or as Orson Welles's Hank Quinlan put it in Touch of Evil: “Just because he talks a little guilty don't make him innocent.”) Anyway, the cast is wonderful; in addition to Depardieu, Dewaere, and Moreau, it includes Miou-Miou, Isabelle Huppert, and, as the woman who provides the milk of human kindness, Brigitte Fossey, who played the five-year-old Paulette in Forbidden Games. Blier went on to better films, as did everybody else.

NEXT STOP… Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, Mon Homme, A Clockwork Orange

1974 (R) 122m/C FR Gerard Depardieu, Patrick Dewaere, Miou-Miou, Isabelle Huppert, Jeanne Moreau, Brigitte Fossey; D: Bertrand Blier; W: Bertrand Blier; C: Bruno Nuytten; M: Stephane Grappelli. VHS, LV, Letterbox COL, INT