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Carrefours and tunnels, "we're in France, all right." Bertrand Blier's Pierrots are a couple of nitwits with perpetual hard-ons (Gérard Depardieu, Patrick Dewaere) who goose matrons, steal cars, determine a girl's age by sniffing her culottes, and generally illustrate the adage about there not being enough blood in the male body to run penis and brain simultaneously. Though they make do with each other when female tail is scarce, virility with the opposite sex is an ongoing concern—it's no accident that the incident that lands the duo a fuzzy blonde (Miou-Miou) who just "spreads her legs and looks at the ceiling" is also the one that gets one of them shot in the crotch, failure to arouse is to macho swagger as crippling as castration. "Plaisirs simples" and dead ends, a risky blurring of heat and threat in the caboose of Freud's train as the fellows terrorize their way past the bra of a lactating young mother (Brigitte Fossey). For all their depredations, the joyriders are meant to be innocents, seized on occasion by the impulse to service a weathered convict (Jeanne Moreau) and shocked when violence explodes around them. (Moreau's stunning rendition of a numbed woman reawakened to sex and horror burns a hole right through the larky veneer, her ménage with Depardieu and Dewaere is the check Jules and Jim wrote but never cashed.) Schatzberg's Scarecrow the previous year, Godard's camera in the shopping cart, the Capra hitchhiking lesson. To "keep driving ahead until the tank is empty" is the characters' goal, along the way there are Renoir pastorals and wayward bourgeois maidens eager to be deflowered. The view of desperation behind the romping is withering, for Blier surely recalls Lord Byron's dictum ("No sterner moralist than pleasure"). With Jacques Chailleux, Marco Perrin, Dominique Davray, Gérard Boucaron, and Isabelle Huppert.
--- Fernando F. Croce |