Préparez vos mouchoirs (1978) - film review

Frustrated at his inability to cheer up his depressed wife, Salonge,  Raoul coerces a complete stranger, Stephane, into having an affair with her.  Despite the attentions of her two lovers, Salonge remains inexplicably withdrawn and sad, preferring knitting to love-making.  However, her mood changes for the better when she befriends a teenage boy genius during a stay at a summer school run by Stephane...

Bertand Blier's Preparez vos mouchoirs (1978) takes us where we would not go.  An unsatisfied wife, Solange (Carole Laure), who is bored by her husband, Raoul (Gérard Depardieu), is introduced by Raoul to Stéphane, a phys. ed. teacher, as a means of relieving her ennui. The solution, however, is ephemeral. While the threesome are on holiday by the sea, Solange alights on a 13-year-old boy, Christian (Riton Liebman) with whom she falls in love.  When Christian returns to boarding school, Solange’s lassitude settles anew upon her. As a result, Raoul and Stéphane kidnap Christian, which leads to the conviction and jailing of the two men. On their release, they are confronted with a domestic arrangement in which Solange, whose equilibrium has been restored, is pregnant with Christian’s child.

Within this inversion of conventional reality, Blier explores a post-modern, post-feminist world in which the ideas of male friendship, male-female relationships, and the pursuit of happiness are re-evaluated in a way that brings the viewer up short. The music of Mozart and Schubert as well as the score of Georges Delerue lend a poignancy and a gravitas to the visual and oral gags which Blier’s work succeeds in throwing up. Jean de Baroncelli of Le Monde got it right when he described the film as un vaudeville finalement mélancolique.  Preparez vos mouchoirs is by no means a tear-jerker, but it is certainly a trail-blazer.

© Nicholas Green (Carlton Vic, Australia) 2010 

In this very entertaining light romantic comedy, Bertrand Blier re-unites the dream team Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, in a near reprise of their roles in his 1974 film Les Valseuses.   However, the similarities with that earlier film are very superficial.

This film, like Les Valseuses, centres on the lives of two grown men, behaving for the most part like irresponsible children.  However, in stark contrast to Les Valseuses, the comedy in Préparez vos mouchoirs is much less offensive, and the story far less anarchistic – Depardieu is now a devoted husband, whilst Dewaere is a Mozart-loving school teacher (it has to be seen to be believed).  This somehow manages to make this the better film.

The film’s main selling point is unquestionably the Depardieu-Dewaere double act, which seems to vastly surpass the formidable talent of the two individual actors and leaves you gagging for more.

The dry, unpredictable – almost surreal – humour is Blier at his best.  From the first scene to the very last, we have no inkling of how the plot is going to develop, or indeed whether the film will end happily or not.  This dangerous sense of uncertainty makes this a very watchable and satisfying piece of cinema.

For Blier, Préparez vos mouchoirs is in many ways an unusually sincere film.  It tackles head-on some profound and controversial issues, such as the complexities of a developing non-platonic relationship between a grown woman and a teenage boy.

The Depardieu-Dewaere comedy ends up as little more than an amusing side-show, to the film’s main theme, which is a tender, yet unsentimentalised, love story involving an unfulfilled wife, who remains virtually silent for the first half of the film, and her surprising new lover.

To construct a convincing romance within an original comic framework is a feat which has defied many a great film director.  In this film, Blier manages just that with apparently consummate ease.   So, get out your handkerchiefs – you may need them after all.

© James Travers 2000

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