Si j’étais un espion (If I were a spy), Bertrand Blier’s first feature film
Tenue de soirée in 1986, Too beautiful for you (Trop belle pour toi) in 1989, which won the Special Jury Grand Prix (tied), Les Côtelettes in 2003: three major films by Bertrand Blier have been presented In Competition. Now a restored version of his first feature film, Si j’étais un espion, Starring Bernard Blier and Bruno Cremer, is being presented at Cannes Classics.
Released in 1967, Si j’étais un espion is the first feature film by the screenwriter and director Bertrand Blier, following his documentary about French youth, Hitler – never heard of him (Hitler, connais pas) made in 1963.
For his first venture, the director called on his famous father, Bernard Blier, to play the character of Doctor Lefebvre alongside Bruno Cremer. Who better than the accomplished actor from Quai des Orfèvres (1947) and Crooks in Clover (Tontons Flingueurs,1963), to play an ordinary person whose life slowly and surreptitiously slides into the extraordinary? The director's portrait of a man fleeing, who is tracked, monitored and trapped in a seemingly endless chain of events, proved he had sound intuition and raised issues of individual freedoms and human enslavement to technology.
The film was not successful, so much so that after seven years of bumping along the bottom, the future director of Buffet Froid (1979) considered hanging up his director's hat. But he hadn't accounted for the boost to his career from working with Georges Lautner in 1970, which later led him to direct Going Places (Les Valseuses, 1974) and his subsequent success.