OUR STORY (Bertrand Blier, 1984)

A resourcefully comical Alain Delon (best actor César) plays Robert Avranche, a Paris garage owner whose impossible episodic adventures begin on a Paris-bound train. A dreamily sensual Nathalie Baye plays Donatienne, a stranger who enters Robert’s first-class compartment explaining, “I want to tell you a story,” and does, about the two of them and their sex together, which they proceed to have betwixt stations. Rather than proceeding home to wife and daughters, Robert follows Donatienne to her home, which he prefers. This is not to Donatienne’s liking; since losing custody of her children in her divorce settlement, Donatienne has filled her life with a loneliness-numbing succession of one-night stands. She has no use for Robert’s falling in love with her: “You take advantage of a poor girl just because she wants to have sex.” When someone later refers to Donatienne as a slut, Robert disagrees: “She sounds to me like a big-hearted girl”—an hilarious line whose poignancy kicks in retroactively later on.
     Preceding Martin Scorsese’s After Hours (1985), writer-director Bertrand Blier’s Notre histoire is structured as a cascading series of dreams, one spilling out of another. Donatienne delivers the key line to Robert’s successor, her new pickup off a train: “In this story . . . things are immaterial. There are passengers who wake up during a dream to realize they are not dreaming. You have to go along with the story.” Visible and audible in the background of some outdoor shots is the moving train that Robert never materially leaves until it reaches Paris. An assortment of dream characters correspond to real ones, and each performance is pitch-perfect.
     I do not like Blier’s Oscar-winning Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (1977), which I find fey, arch, mean, misogynistic. Surprise! I find Notre histoire charming, warm, zany, funny, generous.

Tags: Alain Delon