Going Places

1974 anarchic movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A couple of pals travel around France with a couple of pairs of testicles.

I prefer The Testicles over Going Places for the title of this one. Watching the opening sequences, that former title would make you wonder if this is all about the possible damage Gerard Depardieu is doing to his testicles by running around in those ridiculously tight pants.

There's no character arc here, and the decisions this pair of protagonists--and the third traveler they spend large chunks of the film with--make are often difficult to understand. Their freeflowing romp through France feels naturalistic, and at times, it's almost poetic, at least in a grimy way. It's poetry like Ginsberg's though, typed furiously on papers taped together into a roll so that time isn't wasted removing and replacing pages. Or was that Burroughs? I'm not completely sure what we're supposed to learn from any of it and probably prefer Bertrand Blier's original ending where the characters die in a car crash. The 1940s would have preferred that ending, too.

The Testicles!