Calmos (1976) Online

I saw this movie a long time ago when it was billed as "Femmes Fatales". I remember it as one of the most bizarrely amusing films I've ever seen. While perhaps not as sophisticated as Blier's later efforts, as I remember, it had a crude power and was a scathing look at male/female relations: a kind of cinematic exploration of the male id done with great honesty and comic bravura. I wish I could see it again...but I've never seen it offerred anywhere. It doesn't seem to be on VHS or DVD. If anyone knows where to get it I wish they'd post it here.

Bertrand Blier's film "Femmes Fatales" a/k/a "Calmos" - A very funny and outrageous sex comedy by one of the great French filmmakers. Still groundbreaking after all these years, there's been nothing at all like it. Constantly surprising and hilarious.

The terrific cast is headed by the director's father Bernard Blier and the always wonderful Jean Rochefort as a gynecologist.

Blier's take on the war between men and women is fresh and original and probably as valid and illuminating as any scholarly analysis of the battle of the sexes only much, much funnier. Disappointing that it hasn't been made available on DVD. If presented and promoted properly it could well become a true Home Movie smash.

At least an "8".

Two men are 'on the run' for women. A gynecologist and a pimp have an incredible urge to live in a country without women.

As for the films of director Bertrand Blier, many are praised, but this one not so much. It is understandable why. It starts quite slow and seems a little bit too straightforward for Blier's standards. Les Valseuses (made only a year prior to this film), Buffet froid and Preparez vos mouchoirs tackle the theme less predictable.

But, as others pointed out as well, this film should be placed within its time frame, the 70's, an era in which women were becoming quickly much more independent. I can even remember as a young kid seeing the graffiti 'Wicca' painted everywhere in the my city. And Blier quite captured it, as if he wanted to make a TIME CAPSULE about this subject. He plays with the insecurity of men via the characters of Paul and Albert. They don't hate women, they are just scared of their (sexual) aggressiveness. In this case even in the shape of the most masculine symbol of all… a tank.

I quite loved it anyway. We might have not the Blier-show we are used to but there's still a lot of great cinema to watch, like when Paul consoles Albert when having a nightmare about women; the opening sequence (Paul eating pate when a women spreads her legs and waits impatiently); the scene in which they warn a boy about women. And of course the unforgettable final episode of the film, which will have sparked many discussions in 1976.

While you might have second thoughts about its theme, you should approve the cinematography of the film. Done by Claude Renoir, nephew of the great director Jean Renoir (and thereby grandson of the famous painter). His aid are fantastic actors and great music. While Jean Rochefort is almost always wonderful, in this case, the best performance comes from Jean-Pierre Marielle, whose talent unfortunately is often misused in mediocre films.

A pair of moustachioed Frenchmen, one a gynecologist, the other a pimp, tired of women, escape to the countryside where they can live as they please, drinking wine and eating bizarre French food. Oh, and smoking.

They inspire an exodus of men tired of the sex-positive '70s. At one point, the gynecologist is practically raped by his wife and escapes out the window. Climbing across the balcony he glimpses other men "on the job" in their own houses, lying there like dildos on surfboards, eyes vacant, as their wives hump them as though trying to drive a nail in with their pelvic bones.

One beckons the doctor inside. "She won't notice a thing when she's like this," he explains.

The men wander in the countryside and are soon captured by a paramilitary band of women in tanks who take them to a hospital-prison where the men are zonked and kept aroused so that they can be ridden by sexually frustrated women. Eventually shagged out, women doctors watching their vital signs report they are sinking, and we are treated to a hallucinatory final sequence in which the two men, now looking like Robinson Crusoe, fly antiquated hang-gliders and land in the vagina of a sleeping woman. Abseiling down in her pubic hair like cat burglars, they enter her cave-like opening, where they discover another band of bedraggled gentlemen who have built a fire and are living like they have been shipwrecked. But lo, a man approaches the apparently giant woman (or have the men shrunk?) and they appear ready to have sex. I would have liked to see what this would look like through the eyes of tiny men living inside the woman's vagina, but alas, the movie ends here.

Movies that showed women as sex mad and men as unwilling were a dime a dozen in the '70s. Just look at all those sex comedies that came out of England in that time. It was considered hilarious to show an ugly man assaulted by pretty girls looking for a good time. And just look at all those porno pretend-documentaries from Germany with "report" in the title, that the majority of German people went to see.

Leave it to France, however, to make a comedy with more sex and nudity than all the English sex comedies put together, and more bizarre for the picture it paints of '70s Europe even than the German report films. The first is easy, but I would have thought the latter impossible.