Going Places

There are certain films that occupy unique places in our memories. For me, one of those films is Going Places, known in the original French as Les Valseuses (a French term for the testicles). I hadn't seen the film in over thirty years, and it brought back some interesting memories.

When I was a teen back in the seventies, there was no possibility of me seeing an R-rated film. My parents simply wouldn't allow it. They wouldn't even let me see some PG films (this is kind of bizarre of me to remember this, because they weren't blue-noses by any stretch of the imagination--my father had a large collection of Playboys and Penthouses). So I had never seen any films with anything more sexually explicit than kissing. Of course I was well acquainted with my fathers magazines, and I was well along my way to becoming the man I am today, that is to say, completely twisted.

However, when we moved to New Jersey in 1977 I was introduced to a new thing--cable TV. We got HBO! Now I could, when no one else was around, watch anything they showed. I distinctly remember a few of those films, and how they made me feel. One of them was Going Places.

The film was a 1974 release directed by Bertrand Blier, and concerned a couple of drifting miscreants, Gerard Depardieu and Patrick DeWaere, criss-crossing the countryside and amounting to no good. They commit petty crimes and harass people, in what I suppose was meant to be part of the "sticking it to the man" era of social behavior. They are despicable, yes, but also have a measure of charm that makes this film work as entertainment.

But what makes the film a revelation for a sixteen-year-old boy is the sex. There's a lot of it, with full nudity, mostly in the form of Miou-Miou, who plays a young woman that is simply handed from one guy to another. She ends up tagging along with the two guys, even after one of them shoots her in the leg. Though she is completely passive and treated as a sex object, she has a power over them, though, because try as they might, neither one of them can make her orgasm (there is a long scene where both of them try).

This film would not have been reviewed well by Ms. magazine. In fact, it would make an interesting case study in a women's study program beecaus its attitudes toward women. There's a scene in which Depardieu and DeWaere are on a train, and come across a woman nursing her baby. They are alone, and pay her to let DeWaere suckle on her. She is mortified but agrees (fearing for her safety, no doubt) but as he sucks on her she gets turned on. The ugly fantasy of a sexual assault victim getting aroused by her attacker should make anyone angry, but the scene has an innocence about it that alleviates the digust.

Then there's the sequence in which the boys head to a prison town to find a woman, a real woman, they say, not like the girl who can't orgasm. They pick up Jeanne Moreau, who was a legend in French cinema, and after viewing them with suspicion eventually takes them both to bed. She despairs that she has lost the ability to menstruate while in prison, and says that bleeding is what makes a woman. After her tryst she demonstrates that in grisly fashion. At the end of the film they steal the car of a picnicking family, and the teenage daughter (Isabelle Huppert) wants to ditch her bourgeois parents and take off with the criminals. At Miou-Miou's urging, the boys take the girl's virginity.

Despite some of the statements I've made, I think it's important to stress that this film is a comedy, very often laugh out loud funny. Typically, the guys will get in some scrape and Blier will quick-cut to them running for their lives. Therefore it could be assumed that the treatment of women is a satire, but I'm certainly not sure about that. It is god damned sexy, though.