Roughriders

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

GOING PLACES

Directed by BERTRAND BLIER Screenplay by BERTRAND BLIER and PHILLIPPE DUMARCAY

The inexplicable French need to imitate American Pop-culture forms has produced effects ranging from the weird (Eddie Constantine gangster films) to the wonderful (banana splits at Le Drugstore). But rarely has it resulted in anything as disgusting as Going Places, a Gallic rip-off of road pictures in the Easy Rider manner.

Jean-Claude and Pierrot (Gerard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere), a peculiarly scrofulous pair of vagrants, are discovered, as the picture opens, sexually terrorizing a middle-aged woman before snatching her purse and making joyfully off with it in a scene that Director Blier handles as if he were a mod Mack Sennett. The rest of the film plays variations on this basic theme, all managed in the same chucklesome style, as the youths drift aimlessly around France, mainly stealing cars and abusing women--apparently because life these days offers nothing better to do.

At one point Jeanne Moreau, as a woman just released from prison, falls prey to them. Their method of tormenting her is to relieve her in a single day of all the deprivations--material and sexual -- she has suffered in a decade's confinement. The contrast is too rich for her and causes her to commit one of the most grotesque suicides in recent screen history.

The chief victim of his heroes' affectless assaults is a dumb, frigid yet promiscuous beautician (Miou-Miou). They keep circling back upon her to degrade her in a variety of ways. She masochistically enjoys their abuse, which, of course, strikes the director as the height of hilarity. Eventually she becomes their full-time companion and ally.

The ugliness of Going Places is not the result of ineptness or miscalculation. The perverse comic spirit in which Blier approaches his psychopathic central fig ures is a deliberate attempt at existential shock therapy. It comes off something like a preadolescent's first experiments with dirty words, except that the attitude of amused tolerance with which wise parents often greet that phase is hard to summon up. What one would really like to do is wash Blier's mouth out with soap and pray that his film is an isolated ab erration and not, as some critics and youthful viewers seem to think, a summarizing statement about the spirit of the '70s.

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