Entwined: The Life and Art of Agnes Martin

Happy Holiday by Agnes Martin, 1999, oil and graphite on canvas, five feet square (Tate Gallery)

“I paint with my back to the world.” – Agnes Martin, interviewed by Mary Lance, 2003.

Agnes Martin, the hermetic artist and creator of hermetic paintings that invite us to enter their quiet domain without any preconceptions or conscious thoughts, was such an international figure in the visual cultural arena and so prominent a reclusive presence in her hermitage studio in the Southwest of America, that people are often surprised to learn that she’s in fact a Canadian, born in Saskatchewan in 1912. But once you register her point of origin, and also remember what the flat and spacious physical geography of Saskatchewan looks like, then the austere and serene paintings she sends us, which I maintain are actually pure landscapes devoid of topographical features, then her entire oeuvre, which dramatically anticipated minimalism yet continued the evolution of abstract expression at the same time, suddenly makes shocking sense. As does her somewhat outside-the-mainstream art-world status, earned by her hard-fought battles with psychological crisis, isolation and her seemingly monkish devotion to a solitary existence in New Mexico, one that makes Georgia O’Keeffe come across like a party girl by comparison.

Movie Romances

Bill Murray and Rashida Jones in On the Rocks.

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This article contains reviews of On the Rocks, A Rainy Day in New York, My Octopus Teacher and Love and Monsters.

Rashida Jones is very likable as Laura, a young Manhattanite wife and mother, in the new Sofia Coppola picture, On the Rocks, and the quiet scenes that focus on her emotional responses to situations, when she’s the only person on camera, showcase not just her but also Coppola’s gift for collaborating with her actors to capture quicksilver moods. And there are some very funny bits, somewhat reminiscent of old Paul Mazursky movies, built around Jenny Slate, who plays Vanessa, a friend of Laura’s through their middle-school daughters. Vanessa, a divorcee, chatters on, entirely uncensored, about her love life while she and Laura are ushering their daughters to various activities; it’s as if she weren’t aware that she’s trumpeting her troubles (which mostly concern her recent discovery that the man she’s been sleeping with is married) to the world.

Two Literary Adaptations: Martin Eden and Rebecca

Luca Marinelli in Martin Eden (2019).

Jack London’s 1909 novel Martin Eden is the story of a Bay Area sailor who falls in love with an aristocrat and, simultaneously, with the life of the mind that she and her family prize. Initially out of love, he sets out to educate himself and in the course of doing so he discovers a bent for political philosophy and a passion for writing – and he dedicates himself to the latter, though he nearly starves himself to keep at it. Though in the early stages Martin’s plunge into intellectual waters impresses Ruth, her family’s conservatism – both social and political – weighs on their romance. They’re appalled at his background, his lack of pragmatism (a poor wordsmith who gets published here and there isn’t their ideal of a match for Ruth) and his refusal to censor himself at social gatherings, starting arguments that brands him in their eyes as a dangerous radical. And though Ruth professes undying love for him, the same qualities that alienate her parents unsettle her. In fact, Martin doesn’t fit in anywhere. His sister’s working-class husband, a supercilious bully, thinks he’s worthless. (When he returns from sea, he boards with them and has to put up with his brother-in-law’s insults.) He forms a profound friendship with Russ Brissenden, an alcoholic, tubercular poet whose writing he reveres, but Martin is ill at ease in the world of bohemian socialists Brissenden introduces him to; his own individualistic vision rejects the contradictions and what appear to him to be the easy solutions of socialism. 

Harvest of Memory: The Multi-Faceted Art of Bea Nettles

Harvest of Memory, Bea Nettles (University of Texas Press)

“I see my career as a spiral with my ideas always circling and picking up reflections of earlier thoughts.”– Bea Nettles, Journal, 1990.

“There are parallels to making art and tending one’s garden . . . an image or an idea can be split up, shared, and even better yet, transplanted into someone else’s garden.”– Bea Nettles, Journal, 2011.

John Lennon once famously, and sarcastically, remarked to a journalist that his wife was the “most famous unknown artist in the world,” something that was true only in the sense that Yoko Ono’s serious art-world credentials (which pretty much disintegrated when she married him) were submerged in the notoriety that surrounded their alliance. But as an art historian I can tell you without a doubt that though I greatly admire Yoko’s prescient and poetic pre-John visual-object work (and her first three brilliant recordings), the actual title of Most Famous Unknown Artist really belongs to one Bea Nettles, whose radical work over fifty years is now being celebrated through major retrospective shows that clearly demonstrate how far ahead of her time she was. Only in the rarefied off-the-map art-world circles where true cultural revolution and evolution usually take place was she rightly famous.

Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7

Caitlin Fitzgerald, Alan Metoskie, Alex Sharp, Jeremy Strong, John Carroll Lynch, Sasha Baron Cohen and Noah Robbins in The Trial of the Chicago 7. (Photo: Niko Tavernise/Netflix)

 

Tremendously entertaining and affecting, The Trial of the Chicago 7, written and directed by Aaron Sorkin (and streaming on Netflix), is a first-rate crowd-pleasing zeitgeist picture like On the Waterfront and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. There hasn’t been one of those in a long time – perhaps since The Social Network, which Sorkin wrote and David Fincher directed a decade ago. For all his gifts, Sorkin has a weakness for editorializing, but he didn’t indulge it in The Social Network and he doesn’t here either. He knows he doesn’t need to. The liberal audience can hardly watch this account of the 1969 trial of (originally) eight men, almost all of them young, accused of inciting a riot during the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago – a notorious travesty of the justice system presided over by a prejudiced, unethical, incompetent judge, Julius Hoffman, that became a signpost in the chronicle of anti-Vietnam protest – and not think of contemporary assaults on justice and ethics and contemporary protests. The Trial of the Chicago 7 is to our current political horror show what Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H, set in a 1970 version of Korea, was to the culture of the Vietnam era, but Sorkin doesn’t even do as much as Altman did to forge the link between the two wars by piling on put-on comedy and slipping in a few seventies references (like a shot of the players in the centerpiece football game passing a joint). Sorkin plays it straight. That the movie is as funny as it is bubbles naturally out of the material, which had its own put-on clowns, Abbie Hoffman (Sacha Baron Cohen) and Jerry Rubin (Jeremy Strong), two of the four co-founders of the Yippies (as the Youth International Party was popularly called). They make jokes throughout the trial, even showing up at one point in judicial robes; when the pissed-off judge demands that they remove them, they do so without a murmur, revealing cop uniforms underneath. 

In Memoriam: Jerry Jeff Walker

Jerry Jeff Walker, 1942-2020. (Photo: Paul Natkin)

Jerry Jeff Walker, who succumbed on October 23, at seventy-eight, to the throat cancer that had been dogging him for three years, embodied Austin, Texas so perfectly that it was something of a shock to recall that he was actually a native New Yorker whose early days as a singer and songwriter were spent in the Greenwich Village of the mid-1960s. He moved to Austin in the early seventies, where he was a vital part of the outlaw country movement (“outlaw” because they weren’t mainstream enough to get played on conventional country-music stations), which also included Waylon Jennings, Willie Nelson, Townes Van Zandt, Guy Clark and Steve Earle. These men loved Texas and they made music that sounded like it couldn’t have come from anywhere else. But like liberal Austin itself, they were wild cards – holdover hippies, exuberant free spirits. (Van Zandt, a drug addict who died at fifty-two, was the tragic figure of the group.) You can glimpse Walker in a party scene in James Szalapski’s affectionate 1981 documentary about the Austin outlaws, Heartworn Highways. 

Unhappy Birthday: The Boys in the Band

Jim Parsons, Robin de Jesus, Michael Benjamin Washington and Andrew Rannells in The Boys in the Band (2020), now streaming on Netflix.

 

The Boys in the Band, if you need reminding, is a landmark 1968 play by Mart Crowley about eight gay men at a birthday party: Michael, the host, full of venom and self-hatred; his bookish ex-lover Donald; gentle, self-possessed Bernard; flamboyantly effeminate Emory; promiscuous Larry and stable Hank, a volatile couple; a dumb hustler called Cowboy; and Harold, the figure skater, pothead, and supercool “32-year-old, ugly, pockmarked Jew fairy” whose birthday it is. Emotional hostilities and histories emerge, with Michael finally forcing the others into a sadomasochistic truth-telling game which involves saying “I love you” to someone over the phone. The same actors—Kenneth Nelson as Michael, Frederick Combs as Donald, Reuben Greene as Bernard, Cliff Gorman as Emory, Keith Prentice as Larry, Laurence Luckinbill as Hank, Peter White as Alan, Robert LeTourneaux as Cowboy, and Leonard Frey as Harold—played these roles off-Broadway, in the West End, and in the first film version, from 1970, produced by Dominick Dunne and directed by William Friedkin. The play didn’t reach Broadway until 2018, its fiftieth anniversary, when it was directed by Joe Mantello, produced by Ryan Murphy, and played by an all-gay cast: Jim Parsons as Michael, Matt Bomer as Donald, Michael Benjamin Washington as Bernard, Robin de Jesús as Emory, Andrew Rannells as Larry, Tuc Watkins as Hank, Brian Hutchison as Alan, Charlie Carver as Cowboy, and Zachary Quinto as Harold. The same personnel return for a new film version, which began streaming on September 30 as part of Murphy’s multi-million-dollar deal with Netflix. 

Cinema Comes of Age: Two Books on the Early and Late Stages

 

“Filmmaking is more athletics than art and filmmaking comes from the thighs.” – Werner Herzog, 2011.

Yes, this is an art review, even though it’s about cinema, because although movies are magic, as Van Dyke Parks once sang, they are also the premier art form of the twentieth century. As a visual art critic, I often hasten to point out that from my perspective visual art, and the history of art writ large, must perforce contain not only the aesthetic by-products of the French invention of photography in about 1840 but also the captivating artifacts resulting from the invention of cinema roughly fifty years later. Joseph Niepce, and then later on the Lumière Brothers, who jointly ushered in a seismic shift in the radical creation and revolutionary distribution of images, were visionary frontiersmen inaugurating the dreamlike epoch of the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Was it science, fashion novelty, documentary evidence, or artistic medium? Well, it was all of the above. The still camera and the movie camera are now of course considered among the most modern of all modernist devices, but in those early heady days it was unclear how to situate the new technology, what to call it or how to judge its artistic merits. Such questions have naturally fallen far by the wayside in the wake of remarkable photographic artists such as Stieglitz, Evans, Frank, Arbus, Callahan, and Winogrand (to name only a few) as well as the breathtakingly beautiful motion pictures of Keaton, Bresson, Fellini, Kurosawa, Godard, Tarkovsky and Herzog (to mention some of my own personal favourites). 

Barbara Kopple's Desert One: Broken Wings

A scene from Barbara Kopple's Desert One.

Operation Eagle Claw, the aborted attempt by a Delta Force crew in April 1980 to rescue fifty-two U.S. hostages held in Tehran by revolutionary students in the thrall of Ayatollah Khomeini, doomed Jimmy Carter’s bid for re-election, sealing the popular impression, encouraged by Ronald Reagan’s campaign rhetoric, that he was a milky, ineffectual peacenik who had no idea what to do when faced with the radical aggression of a foreign nation. Four decades later Barbara Kopple’s somber, mournful documentary Desert One presents the mission not as a slip-up but as a tragedy – eight American military were killed when one of the helicopters, its pilot blinded in a sandstorm, collided with a transport in the desert before the rescue team could enter the city – with Carter, who owned the disaster and rode out of the White House on its broken wings, as its face. Interviewed now, he still looks scarred by it, not because of its political implications for him but because of its human cost. Here was a president who steadfastly refused to use the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and the holding of hostages as a provocation for a war with Iran but who arranged for a rescue attempt as a last-ditch solution if diplomacy proved to be futile (as of course it did), and who wound up with casualties incurred outside any field of battle.

City Hall: Frederick Wiseman in Boston

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh in Frederick Wiseman's City Hall.

Still turning out documentaries at ninety, Frederick Wiseman is one of the enduring treasures of American filmmaking. His early films, produced for PBS, dealt with thorny, troubled institutions, and half a dozen of them – High School (1968), Law and Order (1969), Hospital (1970), Basic Training (1971), Juvenile Court (1973), and Welfare (1975) – are classic works of non-fiction humanism, balanced mysteriously between the poignantly familiar and the utterly unpredictable. The greatest sequences in them are the ones that provide moving glimpses of how professionals engaged in the work of these places, which are blighted by deep-seated institutional flaws and misguided policies and decades of accumulated cobwebbed bureaucracy, try like hell to break through and help the ordinary people they’re supposed to serve. At some point, Wiseman’s explorations became less radical and focused on more localized settings – meticulous excavations of towns and neighborhoods, cultural and educational and recreational entities. But the approach he had famously pioneered, drawing viewers into the world of each of these places through sometimes extensive fragments of their daily interactions and eschewing all the elements that we’re still used to in documentaries (voice-over narration, on-camera interviews, intertitles) has remained his modus operandi.

Elemental: New Glass/Metal Paintings by Michael Burges at Odon Wagner Gallery, Toronto

No 2. (2020), acrylic, Plexiglas, goldleaf on aluminum, 8 x 8 inches (Odon Wagner Gallery).

“If we keep our eyes open in a totally dark place, a certain sense of privation is experienced. The organ is abandoned to itself, it retires into itself. That stimulating and grateful contact is wanting by means of which it is connected with the external world.”  – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Theory of Colours (1810).

Some viewers and readers may recall earlier bodies of work by Michael Burges executed in reverse painting on glass, a resistant surface which allowed us to look through to get at, and an intriguing strategy devised to liberate the artist from the acres of textile and canvas customarily used by painters throughout art history, those who formally celebrated its absorbent and tactile qualities. With these new works, this painter continues to explore reverse glass painting mounted on aluminum, an equally resistant and reflective surface capable of carrying the subtle language of his images of time-soaked light as a most effective medium. Our eyes themselves are now the delicate textiles which absorb their fleeting messages, if we allow their mesmerizing gaze back at us. 

Neglected Gem: Monsieur Vincent (1947)

Pierre Fresnay in Monsieur Vincent (1947).

Movies about men and women of faith are usually tepid and sentimental, but a few are extraordinary: Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928), Robert Bresson’s Diary of a Country Priest (1951), Fred Zinnemann’s A Nun’s Story (1959) and more recently Xavier Beauvois’ Of Gods and Men (2010) come to mind. Lesser known is Maurice Cloche’s 1947 Monsieur Vincent, which chronicles the religious vocation of Vincent de Paul (Pierre Fresnay) in seventeenth-century France, beginning with his leaving Paris, where he completed his education as a priest, to take over as curé in a small town in the countryside during the plague. His early life, when he was captured by pirates and sold into slavery, isn’t included in the film; Cloche and the screenwriters, Jean-Bernard Luc and the playwright Jean Anouilh, aren’t interested in the parts of Vincent’s life that qualify it as an adventure story; the entire focus of the picture is on his devotion to the poor, which culminated in his founding the Congregation of the Mission and the Daughters of Charity. (He died in 1660 and was canonized in 1737.) Cloche is a filmmaker from the cinéma de papa era in France – that often-derided period between the golden age of French cinema (the 1930s) and the French New Wave (beginning in 1959-1960) – with whose body of work I am otherwise unfamiliar, but Monsieur Vincent is a fine piece of work: intelligent, sensitive, understated, with a purity of narrative style that lends it a kind of poetry.

Dishonour to Us All: Mulan

Liu Yifei in Mulan (2020).

 

It may look like a film and quack like a film, but something’s just not right with the new Mulan, based on the classic Chinese tale of a young woman who gets conscripted incognito in her disabled father’s place to fend off northern invaders, and gets exposed – yet saves the emperor anyway.

Niki Caro directs this live-action remake of the 1998 Disney animated film with a notable lack of vision. The placement of Mandy Walker’s camera is off and limiting, and we frequently wish for another angle, or a wider one. This is worsened by David Coulson’s slightly sluggish editing. Grant Major’s production design feels stagey: supposedly outdoor locations (excluding the battle scene) are obvious soundstages, and the phoenix that replaces Mushu, who was beloved even in China, looks like a kite. And American Humane wasn't able to say in the end credits that no animals were harmed. 

Great Screen Matches: James Cagney and Joan Blondell

Joan Blondell and James Cagney in He Was Her Man (1934).

 

This is the third in an ongoing series of discussions of classic pairings of screen performers who collaborated on several movies.  Steve Vineberg has also written about Carole Lombard and Fred MacMurray and about James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan.

They were both made for Warner Brothers. In the big-studio era, before Truman broke up the motion picture monopolies following the Second World War, the studios owned theatres across the country, and their individual styles were linked to the kinds of audiences they attracted – that is, to the neighborhoods their movie houses served. Warners catered to working-class and lower-middle-class audiences, so they specialized in gritty films with proletarian heroes and heroines like gangster melodramas and social-problem pictures. Their roster of actors included Edward G. Robinson, Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Sylvia Sidney – and James Cagney and Joan Blondell. When Cagney played a tough, cocky gangster in William Wellman’s terrific The Public Enemy, he wound up a star. Blondell played leading roles some of the time but never quite made the leap to movie-star status. But she was fantastically likable and she had a long career, first in movies and then in TV: in 1979, the year she died at seventy-three, she made two movies and one TV movie and appeared in two series. Her last picture came out two years later.

Balls: The Criterion Collection Release of Town Bloody Hall (1979)

“It was a trivializing, peripheral, silly sort of event, in the best uptown tradition,” Germaine Greer said in 2004 of the panel discussion — or public forum, or celebrity sideshow, or one-off improvised sitcom episode — that was staged by the Theatre of Ideas at New York’s Town Hall on April 30, 1971, under the banner “A Dialogue on Women’s Liberation.” In one respect at least, she wasn’t wrong: the event, which put Greer onstage with three other women representing a range of feminisms, plus Norman Mailer, was very much a production of and for the Manhattan intellectual elite. But the evening was also what it promised to be, a theater of ideas — ideas held up, tossed down, kicked about, laughed at, shouted over, defended, derided. It was raucous and suspenseful and dirty and funny and unsettling, and everything else we’d want theater to be.

It’s all there in Town Bloody Hall, which D.A. Pennebaker (along with two other cameramen) filmed on the night, and which Pennebaker’s creative partner and wife, Chris Hegedus, edited into shape in 1979. The film has now been restored and given its first DVD release by the Criterion Collection, with stellar extras including a new interview with Hegedus; years-later interviews with Greer and Mailer; a partial reunion panel convened in 2004; audio commentary from Hegedus and Greer; and the complete Dick Cavett Show of December 1, 1971, in which Mailer, his brow darkened by drink and professional resentment, took a combative posture toward guests Gore Vidal and Janet Flanner, Cavett, and finally the audience. The Criterion release is a nifty package, and the main attraction still packs a punch. Whatever evasions are attributable to the event or its participants, as a film and as a document Town Bloody Hall is nothing less than thrilling for anyone who cares about the people, the issues, or the history. 

The Ambience of Mind: Music and Meditation

Tony Scott's Music for Zen Meditation. (Verve Records, 1964)

 

“We ought to listen to music or sit and practice breathing at the beginning of every meeting or discussion.” – Thich Nhat Hanh,Vietnamese Zen Master and music lover (Plum Village Records).

What kind of music, if any at all, serves the environmental purpose of establishing the equilibrium sought after by all meditators? Some teachers would suggest that music is in itself a distraction, and perhaps it is, but it’s one which I’ve always felt formed a core place in my own longtime practice. Mine is a kind of beat hybrid of Zen and Dzogchen, and I’ve long used sound as an ideal accompaniment to concentration on the breath, which is in itself a kind of reverberating music created by our own lungs. Putting on a piece of music in order to facilitate meditation also provides me with a set formality and a ritual pattern, within which one can briefly forget all limits.

Rather than calling it meditation music, however, composed or performed to aid in meditation or prayer in a literal religious or spiritual sense, I prefer calling it meditative music, almost as if it’s the music itself which is doing the meditating, through us. The approach of certain modern composers using meditational techniques in their creative practice, with or without application to or focus upon specific religious content, has long been recognized. Many notable examples have also combined concepts, meditation and music in their artistic work. 

Diana Rigg: In Memoriam

Dame Diana Rigg (1938-2020) as Emma Peel in the 1960s TV series The Avengers. (Photo: Terry Disney)

Diana Rigg, who died on September 10 at the age of eighty-two, belonged to the first generation of classically trained English actresses who were permitted to be devastatingly sexy as well as brilliant (Vanessa Redgrave, Helen Mirren). Royal Academy of Dramatic Art-trained, a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company from 1959, she became an international sensation over her three seasons as Emma Peel on the television series The Avengers. Mrs. Peel, as her sleuthing partner John Steed (Patrick McNee) always called her, could down a villain with a kung-fu kick and then dispatch him once again with a wisecrack, delivered with the effortless dryness of a perfect martini. And she wore leather!

Barwood and Robbins

Mark Hamill in Corvette Summer (1978).

When TCM ran Corvette Summer not long ago, I decided to take another look at it. The last time I’d seen it was in a movie theatre in 1978 and I’d been surprised and delighted by it. It starred Mark Hamill – it was his first movie after the car accident that disfigured him during the shooting of Star Wars – as a graduating high-school senior from the suburbs of L.A. with a gift for auto mechanics (the auto shop teacher, played by Eugene Roche, is his hero) who is obsessed with a ’73 Corvette Stingray that he and his class rescued from a junkpile and reconstructed into a spangly, candy-apple, eye-popping gem. When it’s stolen and he learns that it’s been spotted in Las Vegas, he goes in search of it. The irresistible, uncategorizable Annie Potts – a wild card like Betty Hutton in her Preston Sturges comedies – plays the novice prostitute he meets when he arrives; eventually she overcomes his nervousness and gets him into bed, and then they become a couple. The movie turned out to be as much fun as I’d remembered, as great to look at, and as unusual in tone and texture. It was the first picture Matthew Robbins directed, and he inspired the usually lackluster cinematographer, Frank Stanley, to give it a rainbow palette and a neon glow. Corvette Summer is a road movie, a teen comedy and a coming-of-age movie, but it’s highly unconventional as an entry in all three of those genres. Yes, there’s a romance between Hamill’s Kenneth Dantley and Potts’s Vanessa (and a very satisfying one), but the real love story is between Kenneth and the Stingray. The story takes twists you don’t see coming, and not all of them work; neither do all the tonal shifts. But the movie’s charm never wears off, and more than four decades later it still feels fresh.

Memo from the Future: The Trans-Temporal Work of Kirk Tougas

A frame from Kirk Tougas' The Framing of Perception (1973). The monolith-like altar of ultra-consumption ironically reveals that we ourselves are the ones actually being consumed by a seemingly benevolent Moloch.  Image: Tougas.

This article first appeared in the Spanish film magazine Found Footage, March 2020.

“The assertion for an art released from images, not simply from old representation but from the new tension between naked presence and the writing of history on things; released at the same time from the tension between the operations of art and social forms of resemblance and recognition. An art entirely separate from the social commerce of imagery.”  – Jacques Ranciere, The Future of the Image (2003).

“When is appropriation appropriate?” – Kirk Tougas, 2019.

Every film is a tattoo etched on the surface of time, some more so than others. Certain filmmakers, however, eschew entirely the tradition of distracting the audience from awareness of the fact that they are watching and are customarily invited to submit to a wilful disappearance into a real or life-like story. These consummate others instead tend to invite the audience to relish and savour the viewing experience as a sequence of electric paintings, which may or may not contain a program beyond the temporary tattoo incised onto the dream space they occupy while in a theatre. Some of them, such as Kirk Tougas, go even further: they implore the viewer to actively engage in watching their own watching.

The Jesus Rolls: Blier Country

Bobby Cannavale, Audrey Tautou and John Turturro in The Jesus Rolls (2019).

It takes guts these days to remake Bertrand Blier’s freewheeling, anarchic 1974 screwball sex farce Going Places, and that’s what John Turturro has done in The Jesus Rolls (available on Prime). Blier ran afoul of feminist critics back in the seventies when he made Going Places and, four years later, Get Out Your Handkerchiefs. Both films star Gérard Depardieu and the late Patrick Dewaere as stumblebum buddies whose chronic misunderstanding of women is at the heart of both the comedy (in both pictures) and the sadness (in the final scenes of Get Out Your Handkerchiefs). In Going Places, they play Jean-Claude and Pierrot, scruffy, hedonistic auto mechanics in their mid-twenties whose desire for instant gratification is as unmediated as it is in little boys. They pursue sexual pleasure with exactly the same heedlessness and inability to imagine the consequences as they display when they steal a car. The emblem of the movie is a motif of images in which they run for their lives – from the gun-toting owner of a beauty salon whose beloved vehicle they borrowed just for a little drive, from a revenge murder they unwittingly get involved in, and so on. They’re hopeless schlubs whose epic miscalculations trigger one fiasco after another while the universe laughs uproariously at their antics. They’re constantly on the move, but in this context “going places” means “going nowhere”; the movie ends with them (and the woman they share, played by Miou-Miou) relaxing in relative peace and enjoyment of life, but they’re wanted by the law and we know there’s no place they can escape to. The French title of both the movie and Blier’s novel, on which it’s based, is Les Valseuses, which means “balls” and makes it explicit that their relentless bumbling is linked inextricably to their gender. But it’s impossible to envision an audience that would welcome the film now, since Blier takes the prerogative of an artist and makes these morons likable. God preserve the writer or director (Blier co-wrote the screenplay with Philippe Dumarçay) who doesn’t wag a cautionary finger at ill-behaved characters to make sure we know we're supposed to disapprove of them.