Gérard Depardieu, Miou-Miou, and Michel Blanc

Bertrand Blier loves to shock us. He knows we’ve been taught to suppress our desires, to stifle our impulses, to always play by the rules. Society tells us that theft, prostitution, incest, and murder are wrong, but for Blier they’re all just part of life. In his world there are no rules, only lines to be crossed.

Tenue de soirée is all about crossing lines. The first scene takes place in a crowded dance hall. A shabbily dressed married couple are seated at a table. The wife is complaining bitterly about their poverty. The husband meekly responds by telling her she’s beautiful and that he loves her, which only infuriates the wife further. And then a heavyset man who’s overheard the conversation walks up and slaps the wife across the face, knocking her to the floor.

The husband and wife are Antoine and Monique. The heavyset man is Bob, a thief. He invites them to join him in a life of crime. Within the movie’s first fifteen minutes Antoine and Monique have broken into two houses, stolen money and clothes, and seen their trailer home explode in flames. Now that they’ve met Bob, their lives will never be the same.

Monique falls into this new life happily, but Antoine is a bundle of nerves. Not only is he constantly afraid that their crimes will lead to jail or worse, he’s totally confused by the amount of attention he’s getting from Bob. The happy-go-lucky thief flirts with his nervous friend, but denies he’s queer. Then he flirts some more, and now he acknowledges that yeah, maybe he does like having sex with guys. Before long Bob is proclaiming that he loves Antoine passionately. Antoine is completely freaked out.

Antoine wonders if Bob isn’t a little too friendly.

You could almost say that Bob is Blier, and Antoine is standing in for us, the audience. Bob is completely unpredictable, taking every situation and turning it on its head, never allowing Antoine to get comfortable. In the same way, the writer/director keeps throwing us one curve after another, always keeping us off balance. Bob tells Antoine he loves him, and genuinely seems to mean it, but minutes later he’s selling Antoine to an old friend for a stack of crisp bank notes. Bob makes a home for Antoine and Monique, building a life of quiet domesticity, and then goes about deliberately tearing the whole thing to shreds. Each time we think something’s been resolved, there’s a new twist and the film goes off in a different direction. It may seem like chaos to us, but to Blier, it’s just life.

Blier’s stories are all about ripping up the stories we cherish most. They don’t have the structure or the symmetry that we’re comfortable with. Tenue de soirée is an especially aggressive assault on all the things that most of us hold dear. Blier doesn’t even let us settle into a comfortable rhythm. No sooner does one outrageous episode end, than he hits us with another unforeseen crisis. Is this endless parade of insane adventures believable? Of course not. Or maybe I should say, it’s not believable in the usual sense of the word. Tenue de soirée is certainly not realistic, but I don’t think Blier cares about realism.

Blier is interested in people, and the people in his movies are completely believable. They’re just as petty, foolish, greedy, and insecure as the rest of us. But Blier loves his characters, in spite of their faults, and that’s why we still care about them even when we see them at their worst. The director wants to push them to the limit to see what they’re made of. Often, they fail the test. But that doesn’t matter. Their failure just means they’re human.

A moment of honesty.

The film is breathtakingly energetic and funny, in large part because it has an amazing trio of actors at its center. Gérard Depardieu, Michel Blanc, and Miou-Miou are all startlingly alive, and their performances are so compelling that we don’t stop to think about how improbable their adventures are. Blier has his characters run a dizzying gamut of emotions, and the actors always seem to find the right tone. They always make it ring true.

In the end Bob finally pushes everything too far, and instead of whining and moaning, Antoine picks up a gun. He’s had enough. He chases Bob into the streets and hijacks a car, forcing Bob to drive at gunpoint. Antoine has suffered too many humiliations, and it seems he’s finally reached his limit. He can’t go on with this life any longer.

But of course he does. They all do. In Bertrand Blier’s films there are no endings. Somehow life just goes on.