I admit I didn't watch this movie to the end. In fact, I made it to 30 minutes, and even that was a struggle. The fact is, this is perhaps the most misogynistic movie I've ever seen.The only real theme that emerges, with four scenes involving three different women and an unseen teenage girl in those 30 minutes, is a strongly anti-women message. I'm a male, by the way. Aside from this misogyny, the acting is mediocre, the script and plot are thin (a road trip to nowhere, except excuses to sexually assault more women perhaps?), the characters so convincingly unlikable that perhaps they aren't really acting, etc.As for the relatively high rating on IMDb, I guess this is something of a cult movie. But is isn't artistic in any way, not really. There's nothing thoughtful about the cinematography or the score, and as I said, the script and plot are weak. These characters aren't beatniks or hippies looking for some meaning in their lives. Instead, I rather imagine them voting for the Front National.Perhaps I didn't understand the movie. But then again, after watching those 30 minutes, I don't want to understand the movie. It is irredeemable, and Depardieu is a huge disappointment for agreeing to make it.

"Going Places" is the English title of a 1974 French film with two of the famous actors of the era, Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, as freewheeling hoodlums of highly questionable morality. The episodic movie follows their adventures as they try to, among other things, live without working and give pleasure to frigid to women. The latter endeavor includes seducing a soldier's bride on a train, literally chasing a woman through the streets, picking up a woman randomly as she leaves prison, and what becomes their ultimate challenge, giving pleasure to Marie-Ange, who is all too willing to have sex but has never had an orgasm.No one would ever accuse this movie of being politically correct. It is sexist, the heroes are brutish criminals, but the point isn't really that they're doing anything noble or should be forgiven for their sins. It is more of a meditation on self destruction, although I think the fun of this movie is just the tragic black comedy of their hopeless adventures, not analyzing it for some deeper meaning.I enjoyed the soundtrack a lot, well the main theme that kept being repeated, and the credit music was a perfect coda. This is a great French film from the 70s, check it out.

I only lasted through fifteen minutes of this. The first scene has the two main characters - big strong guys - chasing a middle-aged woman around a block of flats and finally cornering her. The woman is prim and prissy and no-one I'd want to know. Her behaviour is as childish as theirs. But there's two of them and only one of her, and they're stronger than her. It really disturbs me that so many people seem to find this scene, and the ones that follow, funny. I think there's a big difference between being bourgeois and having some basic compassion for the human condition. In fact the emptiness of the main characters strikes me as at least as bourgeois in its way as the people who are into glossy cars and so on. Too bad, since I love Stephane Grappelli.

I remember hitch hiking to Spain at 25, getting a lift from, what turned out to be, two fleeing Italian small crooks. They were doing a lot outside the law, but from the other side carrying a little portrait of Jesus in the pocket for their protection...Just and unjust, good and bad, criminal and correct where here in a new combination, outside of the categories I used to know. 'Les Valseuses' gives me, although a film and not real life, a picture close to my own experiences: the intenseness of each moment as soon as you leave 'all behind' and go for the momentous, whatever comes your way, it's another state of mind and also 'dangerous' form of life, because, as we all know, there are people who are not ready for this and willing to persecute you for 'stealing' and so on...This film touches 'values', it's a story about 'what's right and wrong': morals. It's resurrection of the individual fighting him/ herself free against the 'false morals' and conformism...There's danger all the way, because, how far can you go with your own 'freedom' and crossing your own moral borders and that of other people? What to do with people who are willing to hurt you, put you in jail or even shoot at you for the things that you do, like "stealing" some petrol from a multinational oil company for you fifth hand car? Les Valseuses re-awakens these questions in me, because morality, in contradiction to the usual 'media message', is quite complex...