Bertrand Blier, the irreverent French film director behind Oscar-winning romantic comedy Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, has died aged 85.
Blier left his mark on 1970s and 1980s French cinema with films known for their dark humour and cynicism.
He helped to launch the international career of now controversial actor Gerard Depardieu, who starred in the director’s 1974 comedy drama Going Places (Les Valseuses) with Miou-Miou and Patrick Dewaere, about two aimless thugs on a crime and sex spree across the country.
Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (Préparez Vos Mouchoirs), about a ménage-à-trois, won the best foreign-language film Oscar for France in 1979 and the following year he earned a César for best screenplay for Buffet Froid, both also starring Depardieu.
Blier won the jury prize at Cannes and five César awards for 1989’s Trop Belle Pour Toi (shared with Cinema Paradiso).
France’s minister of culture Rachida Dati described Blier as “a genius dialogue writer” and “an immense and nonconformist filmmaker, a mad lover of the freedom to create”.
Jean Dujardin, who starred in Blier’s 2010 black comedy The Clink Of Ice, wrote on social media: “You were a boss. A friend. An inventor in cinema. Your poetry, your audacity, your words, your laughter, your silences… you loved actors so much.”
Former Cannes film festival president Gilles Jacob summarised Blier’s boundary-pushing career: “As much a writer as a filmmaker, as cynical as provocative, as moralist as blasé, Bertrand Blier loved women, but had them mistreated by his men.”
Acting director of the CNC Olivier Henrard called Blier “a master of the verb and the absurd, a practitioner of the art of transgression” and “an audacious and passionate artist, capable of stirring up violent controversy but also of making Les Valseuses, a great popular success that marked the history of French cinema in its time ”.
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