Blu-ray, DVD & Digital debut for Bertrand Blier's classic, GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS

You might not think it possible, but even though GET OUT YOUR HANDKERCHIEFS (Préparez vos mouchoirs) won the Oscar back in 1979 for Best Foreign Language Film, this movie seems more timely-- shocking, even -- in today's crazy climate in which Me2, Trigger Warnings and an America President who prides himself on grabbing pussy all vie for our constant attention.

What goes on in this film will set so many minds on fire (of persuasions both far right and far left) that this new 40th anniversary restoration ought to have arrived with its own special warning label attached.

The writer/director of the film, Bertrand Blier, is by now an old hand at blowing up bourgeois values and exploring other possibilities (from Going Places and Buffet Froid to Ménage and How Much Do You Love Me?), yet what he achieves here goes up against our very dearest values about protecting minors from sexuality. And how Blier achieves what he does is so subversive, funny and full-out/dead-on that, well, there's no turning back.

The film begins in a nice restaurant, as the clientele dines, and one couple -- played by Gérard Depardieu (below, left) and Carole Laure (below, right) -- discuss their problems.

Or at least he does. She is mostly silent, as he becomes further and further convinced that she needs the attentions of another male. To that end, he accosts the single male diner (Patrick Dewaere, above, center) and slowly convinces this man (who is indeed attracted to the beautiful Ms Laure) to become "involved."

From here the movie goes places that you will expect and then takes a turn, and further and further turns, that you will not, ending up in a kind of pitch-perfect black comedy vein that works on a number of levels.

The two males here are so clueless about so much that Get Out Your Handkekrchiefs proves a wonderful, almost-faux comedy about the sort of male entitlement that becomes a kind of prison. TrustMovies suspects that M. Blier would be the last male filmmaker to pretend to understand the female mind, body and psyche. But damned if he is not utterly fascinated with these, and intent on exploring them just the same.

In Ms Laure, he found the perfect specimen to befuddle in extremis his male protagonists. The actress is quiet, centered and finally quite happy indeed. How a very young fellow played by Riton Liebman (below, with Ms Laure, and above, covered in rice pudding), figures into that happiness is a large part of the filmmaker's achievement. M. Liebman centers a couple of scenes in the film, the likes of which have not been managed before nor since.

Also involved and quite good indeed are Michael Serrault (below, left), playing a neighbor initially objecting to loud music played at 3am, and Eléonore Hirt (below, right), as young Liebman's easily swayed mother.

How this movie won (deservedly) Best Foreign Language Film way back in 1979 can mostly be attributed to the huge shake-up in Hollywood that the freedom-loving 70s provided. I cannot believe it could do the same today, in an era when Matt Damon can rightly suggest that perhaps touching and rape are not quite the same thing and then be pilloried for it.

In any case, thanks to the Cohen Media Group, you can discover (or rediscover) the film now, as Get Out Your Handkerchiefs, running 108 minutes, in French with English subtitles, hits Blu-ray (in a serviceable-but-nothing-special transfer, with a nice Bonus Feature introduction by Richard Pena), DVD and digital this coming Tuesday, August 27 -- for purchase and/or rental.

Weighty matters and bizarre male bonding in Denis Côté's documentary, A SKIN SO SOFT

The first thing we see is a hugely muscular man with a very long beard (two photos below). Wow: Rip van Winkle meets Mr. Universe. Then we watch a much younger, clean-shaven man (shown at bottom) having a meal, followed by some body building. Next, a woman's voice announces, Cedric: It's 9AM!, as another resplendent body, full of tattoos and piercings (on poster, right) awakens and rises. Then we move to an Asian-Canadian hunk (shown fourth photo from bottom), who doubles as husband and father and seems like a particularly loving dad. All possess uber-muscular bodies beautiful -- if, that is, you're an aficionado of the culture of body building.

The filmmaker here is that unique French Canadian (via New Brunswick), Denis Côté (shown at left), who has gifted film lovers with a number of oddball and very interesting -- often nearly non-classifiable -- movies. (You can read my post on NYC's Anthology Film Archives' 2012 retrospective of Côté's work by clicking here.)

Oh, his movies are either documentary or narratives, all right, but within those realms, of course, anything is possible. And that's what Côté usually offers. You are likely to finish one (or more) of his films with the same question hanging in front of you: What did I just see?

Expect no easy, one-word answer. Though I would say that you will have probably seen something human -- and humane. Unless the filmmaker is dealing with animals. Then you'll have likely experienced a film that has you somehow looking out through the animals' eyes.

Côté's latest film to reach our shores is A SKIN SO SOFT (Ta peau si lisse), the title of which already causes questions, since lisse translates as smooth, rather than soft), and considering the nearly completely shaven and exfoliated bodies these guys possess (facial hair is evidently OK, however), smooth is definitely the better adjective.

Although we meet and spend some time with maybe a dozen different would-be champions during the course of this 93-minute documentary, there are really just six important men here (we do glimpse a woman body-builder, too, but just briefly). God forbid that we should be given anything remotely like exposition, however. No: The filmmaker just plops us down into their lives willy-nilly and lets us find our own way.

Dialog is kept to a minimum, and what there is does not even advance our understanding much. Instead, and as usual, it's the visuals that keep us alert and interested. Like the big bruiser, two photos up, who suddenly and quite literally seems to be pulling a two-ton truck. Later, we see the same guy (at least, I think it was he) fast asleep with a great big dog lying in his lap. So dear! And then suddenly he's wrestling -- not body-building -- in a scene that makes Canadian wrestling look even dumber and more phony than the American variety.

We imagine that these men are in training for some competition, and during the film's final third, we do see, briefly, a competition. We also imagine that perhaps these guys do not know each other and are are not connected in any way. And then M. Côté delivers his pièce de résistance -- again, with no exposition, little dialog and just those visuals, this time in a gloriously verdant outdoor setting.

Anyone demanding a connect-the-dots experience had better avoid A Skin So Soft. We could certainly have gotten to know these guys a hell of a lot better via more conventional movie-making means. But for those willing to take a chance, and perhaps get to know body-building culture from what you might call the inside-out, the movie may turn out to be -- in its bizarre and very nearly fuck you, viewer! manner -- something almost memorable.

From Breaking Glass Pictures, the documentary opens this Friday, July 6, in New York City for a week-long run at Anthology Film Archives. It has played L.A. already and is available now for purchase or rental via Amazon VOD. Breaking Glass also promises that a DVD will be forthcoming soon. 

Iceland's Dagur Kári offers up THE GOOD HEART; Cox and Dano shine; TM does a Q&A from memory

The land of that volcano does boast some positive attributes.  Chief among these, for moviegoers at least, is writer/director Dagur Kári, shown below, whose first full-length film, the bizarrely funny and extremely energetic Noi, the Albino (Nói albínói) back in 2003 caused some critical heads to turn his way. Kári's following film, Dark Horse (Voksne mennesker), despite a couple of small festival showings, was hardly seen on these shores, but that should not be the case with his new one (and first in English), THE GOOD HEART.

At a very low-key and pleasant roundtable Q&A with Mr. Kári and one of his stars, Paul Dano (the other, Brian Cox, was to have appeared but was stuck in Europe, due to volcanic ash), we conversed with that the writer/director, whose English is pretty good, and learned that this project took several years to come to fruition. (For the first time in his interviewing history, TrustMovies managed to set up his digital recorder, then forgot to hit "record," so the Q&A interspersed here is coming from his ever-dimmer memory bank.) 

The Good Heart brings together two men of disparate age, circumstance and attitude.  Brian Cox (above) co-stars as a surly, crotchety old bar owner in yet another role that will have critics crying, "His best ever!" (Mr. Cox, who is but 64 and has managed nearly 160 film and TV appearances, makes a habit of being so good so often -- from Red Eye to Red, The Escapist to Trick 'r Treat -- that this sort of praise, true as it is, must grow tiresome for him to hear.)  Paul Dano (show below, with a feathered friend who proves quite important to the film), who has also managed to be expert in literally every film he's made, no matter if the film itself might come up a little short, plays a homeless young man who is taken under the wing of the Cox character.

How all this comes about is actually quite fun, and no less unbelievable than what happens in most romantic comedies to which mainstream audiences are these days subjected.  The characters' "cute meet" (and what follows it) works due in part to how charming and dear it all is, with Cox's salty language and demeanor a perfect foil for Dano's innate and never-pushed sweetness. This young actor does vulnerability about as well as anyone since the pre-Psycho Tony Perkins.  When TM asked Dano about this during the Q&A, the actor seems at first surprised but then agreed that, yes, the type of roles he is offered (and then selects from among) tend to go in this direction.  "How do you keep your stability" another blogger wanted to know, and Dano explained that he is fortunate indeed to have a girlfriend of 2-1/2 years who will spank him (not literally, he assured us) whenever he gets out of line. (One of my compatriots later informed TM, who tends not to keep up with who's dating whom, that the girlfriend is none other than Zoe Kazan. So, good for this talented young couple -- who probably keeps each other in line, in the way that smart "significant others" tend to do.)

But back to The Good Heart.  So juicily does Mr. Cox latch onto his character with his sleazy conversation, and so sweetly does Mr. Dano try to negotiate all this and more, that the two engage in a constant and lovely pas de deux which is broken around midway by the introduction of a new character, a young, beautifully exotic and evidently down-on-her-luck woman whom Dano's character takes in, just as Cox has done with Dano.  Complications, unsurprisingly, ensue, but they are nothing compared to the gaping hole that the movie then becomes. 

This young woman is played by the terrific French actress Isild LeBesco (of À tout de suite, Backstage and Wild Camp: click the title of the latter for a review by my Greencine compatriot Craig Phillips).  Le Besco is extraordinarily good at expressing youthful rebellion and outrage at conventionality, among other things. But she does need a trace of character to do this, and she gets practically none from this writer/director.  Instead, we have "generic woman" intruding on a pair of happy guys and making their life, particularly that of Cox's character, miserable.  April, as she's called, has no back-story except that she's a flight attendant suddenly out of work. And that's it.  We know Dano's Lucas, at least from from his homeless routine, hospital stay and relationship with Cox's Jacques, who has enough sentimental back-story to choke a horse.  Of April, we learn nothing, except that Kári intends her to wreak havoc on our poor guys and their male bastion of sanctity.

While this hole does not sink the movie, it de-balls it somewhat.  My first question to the filmmaker was about the role that the woman plays in the proceedings, and he explained that, as we can clearly see, she interferes with and helps destroys this male bastion. Well, OK.  As I recall from Kári's earlier Noi, the female get short- shrifted, as well, but I will reserve judgment until I see another or two of this interesting filmmaker's work.  I hope he'll tackle a strong female character and bring her to life. 

The movie is still a lot of fun: sweet and moving and funny.  The three leads are a treat to watch, as is every individual bar patron, brought to fine form by a well-chosen cast.  (Kári told us during the Q&A that only a small portion of the film was shot in New York but most of it was filmed in Iceland; yet the mix of Icelandic, UK, American and French actors on display never jars.)

The Good Heart (approx 95 minutes, from Magnolia Pictures) opens this Friday, April 30, at four theaters in the Southern California area, and one in New York City.  All its current and forthcoming playdates, theaters and cities can be found here.