Going Places

The original French title of Going Places is Les valseuses, French slang for "The Testicles" ("The Nuts" would be its English counterpart). That's a pretty accurate description of Bertrand Blier's characters, a pair of aimless, amoral twenty-something buddies bouncing (or escaping) from one situation to another, all instigated by their own mix of childlike bad behavior and poor impulse control. You could call Going Places a sex comedy where sex has become some joyless act instigated out of instinct; a road movie where the road is less a promise of freedom than an escape hatch from whatever trouble they've landed themselves in; or a crime spree comedy of petty offences by dim crooks driven more by the thrill of transgression than the reward of ill-gotten gains. Jean-Claude (Gérard Depardieu, all thuggish charm and studly swagger) and Pierrot (Patrick Dewaere as his often reluctant partner in crime) are not cute or creative rebels with a cause. These smug, swaggering young men are crude, often cruel petty thieves without principle or a master plan. They run on pure impulse and Blier takes pains to show these guys at their worst in the opening scenes. They harass a middle-aged woman before snatching her purse, force a mother on an otherwise deserted train to breastfeed her infant in front of them (and then let Pierrot have his turn at the teat), and all but sell a girl kidnapped in a getaway as part of an auto trade-in with a chop-shop owner. It turns out that the girl, named Marie-Ange and played by Miou-Miou, doesn't mind being used as a sex toy. It's just that these self-proclaimed studs fail to rouse her sexually. She just lays there, inert and bored, as they compete to get a reaction from her. After being the fall-back bed for Jean-Claude and Pierrot between misadventures, she just falls in as the third leg of this bohemian ménage-a-trois, content to drift along with them from one scam to the next: Bonnie and Clyde and Clyde. As the title suggests, these guys are pretty much led by the little brain. They are not pleasant or even particularly likable fellows. Their loyalty and devotion to one another (and, with time, to Marie-Ange) is their only redeeming quality. But they aren't total cads. At one point, Jean-Claude picks up a frumpy woman (Jeanne Moreau) just released from prison and treats her like a queen. It's a devastating sequence, with Moreau's ennui and resignation briefly roused to pleasure before she ends their brief encounter with a startling and stunning act of will. Blier, true to form, tosses in a lurid detail with uncomfortable resonance in terms of sexuality and self-image. And when they honor her death by lending a helping hand to her son (also just out of prison), their generosity (which, for these guys, amounts to backing him up on a home invasion) simply lands them in even deeper hot water. As for their victims, Blier's supporting cast is a collection of hypocrites and conformists: the arrogant rich and the complacent, repressed middle class. Jean-Claude and Pierrot are, for better and worse, as uninhibited as they are unthinking. As crude and cruel and destructive as they can be, the rest of the world doesn't have anything better to offer. Going Places, released in 1974, was Bertrand Blier's third feature but his first from his own material, in this case an adaptation of his own novel, and it frames his subsequent career of films that explore sex, power, pleasure, desire and disappointment in modern relationships. Where Jean-Luc Godard's criminal rebels, the children of Marx and Coca-Cola of his sixties films, are his take on his era, Blier's portrait of showy machismo, reflexive bad behavior and empty pleasure is his sad commentary on seventies culture. Jean-Claude and Pierrot could be the poster boys for French chauvinism as impotent rebellion, with testosterone and self-absorbed entitlement in place of politics and social awareness. Which isn't to say they don't care about anything. They just don't love anyone as much as themselves, or each other. This is one bromance that is as physical as it is emotional. They share everything, including their women and, at one point, one another. "It's only natural between friends," Jean-Claude proclaims after taking Pierrot against his will. It's quite the jaundiced view of the human animal and seventies social culture, though Blier seems to have a soft spot for these childish blowhards and petty crooks, an attitude reinforced by the comic presentation of their criminal antics and the lighthearted, jazzy score by jazz violin legend Stephane Grappelli. It's not quite social satire and it's not always defensible, but then Blier never really suggests these guys are heroes in any way. To call them rebels against conformity would be to give them too much credit. Going Places is really an anti-protest film and their rebellion an indictment of their self-involved generation and unthinking culture. These guys have no self-awareness, only a drive to feed their drives and desires from one moment to the next. It's neither admirable nor attractive, but in their contradictions and confusion is an authenticity of human impulse and crude desires brought to the surface. Previously available on DVD from Anchor Bay, Going Places is released in a new HD master on both DVD and Blu-ray from Kino Lorber under the Kino Classics brand. Apart from a brief sequence about 35 minutes in where the quality takes a noticeable drop, likely due to resorting alternate elements to replace missing or damaged footage, the image is sharp and strong with solid color and the mono soundtrack is fine. The sole supplements are a stills gallery (with just a handful of publicity shots) and the original French trailer, which is well worth checking out. It features no footage from the film, just a cheeky montage of cartoon images edited to a roll call of slang terms for testicles, but its dance along the edge of good taste certainly captures the tone and attitude of the film. For more information about Going Places, visit Kino Lorber. by Sean Axmaker