|
Between Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex and La Città delle donne, Bertrand Blier takes stock of the sexes of the battle. "Pussies and asses" all day long for the gynecologist (Jean-Pierre Marielle), he just wants to savor paté on baguette but there's a pornstar spread on the stirrups. The hangdog pimp (Jean Rochefort) is his comrade in carnal exhaustion, not even his dreams are safe from rapacious female demands: "As soon as my eyes are closed, they barge in." A pastoral cottage provides refuge, nothing but calm and musty clothes and "glorious cholesterol" until they're ordered to return for marital duties, the doctor's wife (Brigitte Fossey) cries "baise-moi" while he cowers under the bed. "A survival operation" during the feminist Seventies calls for a reverse Lysistrata, Blier pushes satirical misogyny to its limits with sci-fi sang froid. (Claude Renoir's camera and George Delerue's score gild the salacious comic-strip with incongruous lushness.) The new studs are middle-aged schlubs, "le plaisir pour le plaisir" to them means not dealing with the opposite gender, the mock-gallant exodus they precipitate ends up in the middle of the desert. A tank with a feminine voice disperses the march, gals in fatigues maraud the landscape for erections. ("Moroccan fighters were schoolboys compared to them," moans one drained fellow amid the rubble.) The chauvinistic psyche splayed open in all its comic folly, a bravura treatment of Hustler cartoons made flesh. The prisoners wake up towering under the sheets, cf. L.Q. Jones' A Boy and His Dog, every woman gets a ride. The punchline is Bukowski's "culmination of the opposites," for sure. With Bernard Blier, Valérie Mairesse, Micheline Kahn, Sylvie Joly, Claude Piéplu, Dora Doll, Dominique Lavanant, and Claudine Beccarie.
--- Fernando F. Croce |