Bertrand Blier's Les Valseuses (1974)

Les Valseuses is a ground-breaking film of the 1970s, and in particular led to making Gérard Depardieu and Bertrand Blier household names. It shows amoral behaviour, is violent, sexy and at the same time amusing. A pair of petty thieves in their twenties – Jean-Claude (Gérard Lepardieu) and Pierrot (Patrick Dewaere) – run riot having sex with women, stealing where they can, menacing people and generally having what they consider to be a good time.

They have little respect for anyone, terrify an elderly woman and rob her, terrify a young mother on a train, and steal a number of cars and quite an amount of money from the doctor who helps Pierrot with a gun injury when a man shot him between the legs for stealing his car. A hopelessly bad couple of men then?

Well, yes, although you can't help but laugh at them and, oddly, like them, although this is no comedy. Take, for instance, the way they break into a deserted house and guess the age of a young girl who lives there with her family, the way they look at her underwear and sniff her knickers to judge her age, like connoisseurs of vintage wine. Or Pierrot pleading with the gun-wielding hairdresser to spare him as he only 'borrowed' his car.

Marie-Ange (Miou-Miou) is the hairdresser's assistant who goes off with the pair and then returns, although they go back to her a few times, using her for sex and she's a willing partner to a threesome (well, this is the 1970s), but they're not happy with her because she's not having noisy orgasms and throwing herself around. Cue for the older Jeanne Pirolle (Jeanne Moreau) to leave prison after a number of years and team up in a threesome, only to leave the room while the pair are deep in post-coital sleep, lie on the other bed and, in despair, shoot a bullet between her legs. This of course recalls the bullet the hairdresser fired between Pierrot's legs, as the trio recalls the trio in Jules et Jim, and Jeanne's suicide recalls Catherine's suicide in Jules et Jim. In a minor and much more different way, the sexual initiation of the sixteen-year-old Jacqueline (an early performance by Isabelle Huppert) also remembers the famous Jules et Jim trio.

As Jean-Claude, Pierrot and Marie-Ange drive off we know not where, they enter a tunnel, and everything is black as the screen credits begin to roll. It seems a fitting ending: a drive into nothingness.