Have time, fashion and political correctness finally triumphed over 59-year-old Bertrand Blier, the sardonic French filmmaker of “Get Out Your Handkerchiefs,” “Buffet Froid” and “Menage”? Some critics think so. Not me.
Since Blier blasted his way onto the world film scene with 1974’s foul-mouthed “Going Places,” he has gotten away with a series of cinematic outrages against polite sensibilities, albeit highly praised ones. But the Chicago premiere of “Mon Homme” reminds us that no new Blier film has received much U.S. play since his 1988 “Too Beautiful for You,” and that “Mon Homme” is actually a 1995 picture receiving a belated U.S. release.
“Mon Homme” has received mixed reviews. Though it’s about prostitution, Blier avoids the usual social, psychological or moralistic approaches. Though he underscores the sex scenes with ecstatic liturgical music (by Henryk Gorecki) and the others with Barry White’s smoky seduction songs, he doesn’t preach. Instead, he shows us the rocky love affair of a hooker with a heart of gold (Anouk Grinberg) and her not-very-bright pimp (Gerard Lanvin) — a callous bum who breaks her heart and drives her from a profession she honestly loves.
Blier portrays all this with his usual mix of verve, unbuttoned urbanity and irreverence. This is one of his best films. When we first meet Grinberg’s Marie, she’s a spunky charmer prowling a hotel, so brash that she recruits a housewife into prostitution in the film’s first five minutes.
But the trick that opens her heart and seals her fate comes when she finds Lanvin’s Jeannot passed out by her stairway. She takes him in out of seeming charity, quickly seduces him and then falls madly in love. Naturally, she asks him to be her pimp. And as Blier cleverly shows, things begin to fall apart when Jeannot ineptly tries to act like a pimp.
The fact that Marie starts out as a genuinely happy hooker and later becomes a housewife and mother — and that Grinberg plays her with such transparency, vigor and tenderness — has led some critics to suggest that “Mon Homme” is simply Blier’s own twisted male sexual fantasy of the ultimate compliant woman. But Blier has the last laugh. “Mon Homme” is one of Blier’s best comedies, a sympathetic crime movie about very stupid behavior that makes romantic obsession understandable.
As always with Blier, the dialogue is startling and funny, the situations mad but plausible and the acting brilliant (especially Grinberg). “Mon Homme” reveals a moviemaker of uncommon perception and audacity, someone who sees beneath the maddest sexual or social maneuvers to the tangled desires below. “Mon Homme” opens Friday at The Music Box Theatre. No MPAA rating. (star) (star) (star) 1/2
