Get Out Your Handkerchiefs

"Get Out Your Handkerchiefs" is an excellent piece of storytelling and a refreshing film. It flows freely and is full of interesting and engaging twists, one of which is surprising but serves well in tying it all together.

Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere play two gentlemen at the mercy of an oddly ailing woman, Solange. Doctors are no help, and the two men obviously mean little to her, but they keep at it and decide that what she needs is a child, which she cannot give birth to.

Things happen and as the story unfolds, it brings the viewer in closer and examines happiness from an offbeat angle. If nothing else, "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs" is fun and engaging and should not be missed.

If your ideas about sexual relations are fixed, don't see this film. Bertrand Blier turns everything upside down. No clichés here. This is relational anarchy at its most challenging. It's moving, it's stimulating and it is very well acted. Les valseuses was equally anarchic, but its tendency was rather unsympathetic. In Les valseuses, Depardieu and Dewaere were highly unlikeable. Here they are very likeable, and Carol Laure is beautiful in all her passivity.

What might seem an already risqué love triangle between two misogynous men (Depardieu and Dewaere, repeating their successful teaming of "Les Valseuses") and a pathologically passive woman (Carole Laure) develops into a REALLY unconventional love quartet when a 13 year-old boy (Riton) is thrown into the story and wins the woman's sexual and emotional favors over the grown men, and nothing turns out quite the way one would expect.

Good reasons to see this movie: A) cliché-free, offbeat satire with brilliant dialog and surprise turns everywhere (director/writer Blier's specialty is, of course, épater la bourgeoisie, e.g. "Les Valseuses", "Tenue de Soirée", "Trop Belle pour Toi"); B) young, fit, ugly-handsome Depardieu's rounded performance; C) a very different approach to love and sex in movies, unlike the usual everyday stuff; D) wonderful Michel Serrault.

Favorite sequences: the opening scene at the restaurant, in which the offbeat dialog states at once this is not "another love story" (very honest of Blier to show his cards early on); the cheese war sequence; Serrault extracting all the information he wants from Riton's mother with one single question; Riton's young mates asking him about how it feels like to make love to a woman ("Are there hairs inside?", they ask). Minor letdowns: the so-so ending; Carole Laure's rather blunt approach to her apparently blunt but wonderful role (imagine Isabelle Huppert doing it!!); Riton's utter lack of appeal (he had a physique reminiscent of Benoît Ferreux, the boy in Louis Malle's "Le Soufflé au Coeur/Murmur of the Heart", but not an ounce of his charm).

As a footnote, it's interesting to remember that this film won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, which tells a lot about how much more open-minded American movie industry people were in the 1970s. Giving an Oscar to a similar film today would be unthinkable in sexually neo-prudish Hollywood of the 2000s(an adult woman falling for a 13 year-old boy WHILE being the lover of two other men!). Recommended for viewers who enjoy unconventional story-telling and, well, unconventional sexual situations spiced with a subversive sense of humor.

This film is wonderful. Blier brings classic elements of French farce films into cuttings that remind me of Melville. He does a wonderful job of developing Solange, Raoul, and Stephane as caricatures...giving the viewer great understanding of how these characters will react in future situation. The eratic behaviors are completely acceptable on the same terms that the wild cuts...from dinner table to summer camp, and opening in a restaurant with no frame of reference...forces one to become involved in the story. So many Hollywood films 'do the work for you' so to speak. This leaves the movie experience stale. I'm not going to get involved in a film unless the director invites me to do so. Blier certainly does that. And the Mozart concerto helps. Gervase de Brumer.

Describing the plot of this film is rather pointless, since it reads in black and white rather absurdly, even for a comedy. But it works! The acting is great, (including a handsome and youthful Depardieu before he turned into a sloppy behemoth), the jokes are funny and the direction and camerawork make you feel like you've been dropped into a Van Gogh. What I like about French movies or at least what i used to like, was their ability to transport you into their wonderful culture for the duration of the film. Over the past 20 years however, French cinema for many dynamic cultural and economic reasons, has slowly allowed its identity to slip away. If you've never been to France or are just yearning to take a return trip for 90 minutes or so, this film will give you as good a taste of the French way and outlook on life, as a 2 week Frommers trip.