General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs (French: Préparez vos mouchoirs) is a 1978 French-Belgian comedy-drama written and directed by Bertrand Blier, in which a husband tries to cure his wife's depression by finding her a lover, and she is finally revived by a 13-year-old boy. It won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film at the 1979 ceremony.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Original title	Préparez vos mouchoirs (1978), France–Belgium, in French²
Director and writer	Bertrand Blier³
Principal cast	Gérard Depardieu (Raoul), Patrick Dewaere (Stéphane), Carole Laure (Solange), Riton Liebman (Christian), Michel Serrault³^•⁴
Key crew	Cinematography Jean Penzer; music Georges Delerue; editing Claudine Merlin⁵^•²
French release	11 January 1978⁵
Major awards	Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film (1979); César for Best Music (Delerue); Golden Globe nominee for Best Foreign Film; National Society of Film Critics Best Film of 1978¹^•⁵^•⁶
Runtime	Listed as 108 minutes by the US distributor, 1h48 by a French film database, and 2h05 by the La Rochelle festival catalog³^•⁵^•²

Spoilers

Plot

Solange (Carole Laure) is seriously depressed: she has stopped smiling, eats little, speaks rarely, and has fainting fits. Her husband Raoul (Gérard Depardieu), a driving instructor, decides her happiness matters more than his own and, in the film's opening, hands her to a stranger met in a brasserie, Stéphane (Patrick Dewaere), hoping a lover will make her want to smile again.⁴^•⁵^•⁷

Stéphane, a schoolteacher who listens to Mozart and keeps his pocket books in alphabetical order, fails to cheer her any more than Raoul does. Everyone around the couple, including a neighbor who runs a vegetable shop (Michel Serrault), agrees that what Solange needs is a child, but she does not become pregnant by either man. The three take jobs running a children's summer camp, where they meet Christian (Riton Liebman), the precocious 13-year-old son of the local factory manager. It is Christian who restores Solange to laughter, and she wants to have his baby.⁴^•³

Production and origins

From a Mozart scene. Blier described the film's origin as a single scene in which the characters talk about Mozart. After making Calmos (1976), he took up that scene again and built a new screenplay around it, a process he estimated at about two months of work. He noted that 1976 was being called the year of the woman, and the film was made as what he called a homage to women.⁸

Reuniting the duo. After the success of Les Valseuses (1974) and the failure of Calmos, which Blier himself called the biggest idiocy of his career, he brought back the pairing of Gérard Depardieu and Patrick Dewaere, the two actors who had carried Les Valseuses. Carole Laure took the female lead in place of Miou-Miou, who had separated from Patrick Dewaere in 1975.⁹^•¹⁰

Georges Delerue wrote the score, his first collaboration with Blier having come earlier on Hitler, connais pas !; Jean Penzer was the cinematographer and Claudine Merlin the editor. Production companies included Ariane Films, CAPAC, Belga Films, and SODEP.²^•⁵

Reception and awards

The film was the official French entry for the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film and won the Oscar at the 1979 ceremony. Georges Delerue's music won the 1979 César for Best Music, and the film was nominated for the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film.¹^•⁵

In the United States, the National Society of Film Critics, which does not separate English-language and foreign-language films in its balloting, named it Best Film of 1978, a result the Washington Post's Gary Arnold called somewhat surprising given that the film had opened in New York barely two weeks earlier. Blier placed as runner-up for the society's Best Director and Best Screenplay awards, and the New York Film Critics Circle placed his screenplay second.⁶^•¹

American reviews quoted by the distributor called the film "exuberant and highly inventive" (The New York Times) and "very funny, very wise & happily subversive" (Newsweek).³ On Rotten Tomatoes it holds an 83% critics score from 18 reviews and a 74% audience score.⁷

Place in Blier's work and controversy

The film belongs to the run of provocative comedies that made Blier's reputation in the 1970s. The Rough Guide to Film groups it with Buffet froid (1979) as the work that consolidated his standing alongside Depardieu and describes it as a big commercial hit and a classic of modern French comedy that interrogates middle-class notions of taste.¹¹ Le Monde's obituary of Blier, who died in January 2025 at 85, characterized the film as one of his darkest, mixing black humor and absurdity with a deconstructed script.⁹

Its treatment of the 13-year-old Christian, who becomes Solange's partner and the father of the child she wants, has kept the film controversial. A Russian film-history study records that the critic S. Freilich (1920–2005) took the film as evidence that bourgeois French cinema had crossed a line by making children participants in sexual games, while the study's author judges that example poorly chosen.¹² A Cinéfiches review scored the film 12/20 and criticized what it called recurring misogyny in Blier's work, while praising the wordplay and the performances.⁵ The film's most famous sequence remains the Mozart conversation from which the screenplay grew.⁸

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026