Préparez vos mouchoirs (1978)
Directed by Bertrand Blier

Film Review

It was Les Valseuses (1974) which established the international reputation of French film director Bertrand Blier, whilst also effectively launching the careers of its two lead actors  Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere.  Four years later, the threesome were reunited for a film that was every bit as provocative and  another box office winner.  Préparez vos mouchoirs proved to be a surprising hit in the United States, where it won the Academy Award for the Best Foreign Language film in 1979.  Such a result would now seem inconceivable for a film that deals so overtly with a sexual encounter between a grown woman and a teenage boy.  Indeed, it seems unlikely that such a film could ever be made today.

And how typical of Bertrand Blier, the most iconoclastic of French filmmakers, that he should take a familiar children's fairytale (Sleeping Beauty) and rework it into a trenchant commentary on contemporary sexual attitudes, one that re-evaluates male-female relationships in the post-feminist era whilst ripping the guts out of some of the most enduring of taboos.  Préparez vos mouchoirs is a far more comfortable film to watch than Les Valseuses - it is structured more conventionally and presents the spectator with far fewer shocking images, and yet it is just as daring, perhaps even more so, in what it actually has to say.  The main thrust of the film seems to be that the male machismo is a spent force; what turns on the modern woman is not an acre of rippling muscles but a mind she can engage with and which exhibits characteristically female qualities - tenderness, commitment and innocence.

The representation of the female beau idéal as a gauche teenage boy with a high I.Q. is clearly intended to be symbolic, not to be read as an exhortation to paedophilia.  In later years, Blier would frequently be branded a misogynist, mainly by feminists who failed to comprehend his work.  Far from being misogynistic, Blier's films show a profound understanding of the modern female psyche, and they deal with the contradictions and complexities of the sexual needs of today's liberated woman far more intelligently than most contemporary films.  Perhaps encouraged by the success of this film, Blier would return to the thorny subjects of adolescent infatuation and paedophilia in his next film but one, Beau-père (1981), his next, and arguably finest, collaboration with Patrick Dewaere.

Film Synopsis

Raoul has tried everything he can think of to cure his wife Solange of her habitual melancholia, but in vain.  In desperation, he coerces a stranger he meets in a restaurant into sleeping with her.  The stranger, a Mozart-loving P.E. teacher named Stéphane, proves to be just as incapable of curing Solange as Raoul, and even with help from Raoul's neighbour the cause appears to be a hopeless one.   Still holding out for a miracle, Raoul takes Solange with him to a boys' summer camp run by Stéphane.  The miracle happens, but not as Raoul had envisaged.  It is a thirteen year old boy who revives Solange from her zombie-like torpor...