Getting it up = Les Valseuses [Widescreen]

Jean-Claude (Gerard Depardieu) and Pierrot (Patrick Dewaere) are two ageing delinquents loitering around the Sarcelles housing project. Always ready for an adventure, especially if it involves sex, they attempt a car robbery which leaves Pierrot wounded and forces the pair to flee across the country with Marie-Ange, a frigid hairdresser, as side-kick and scapegoat. From there on ‘Les Valseuses’ becomes a road-movie filled with encounters with a variety of sexually frustrated women whom the infamous trio offers to ‘liberate’. Partly due to the no-hold barred acting style and the shaprness of its one-liners, the film was immediately popular in France. It ‘made’ the carreer of Betrand Blier and coined his reputation as a mysogynist filmmaker. The film also propelled the careers Depardieu, Miou-Miou, Dewaere and Huppert. Even by today’s standard the film has lost none of its shock value. In this odd sexual oddysey Blier captures a raw vision of sex, often ridiculous, thoroughly misapprehended, yet essential. ‘Les Valseuses’ can also be regarded as the precursor of films released in the 1990s exploring every transgressive aspects of human (mostly male) sexuality, such as Neil LaButte’s ‘In the Company of Men’ or Gregg Araki’s ‘The Living End’. For all its jabs at conventional morality, the film also carries a strong sense of class prejudice all too willing at times to portray its working-class protagonists as sexually predatorial bludgers. The film is also known as Going Places (U.S. title), Making It, The Waltzers, but the title best translates as ‘Dangly bits’ or ‘Testicles’. Adapted by Betrand Blier from his novel. In French with English subtitles.