I'm no longer quite sure what to make of Bertrand Blier's Going Places; I loved it when I first saw in the early 1980s, and now it's attitudes just seem mean-spirited and kind of mysogynistically quaint.

It's about two louts who roam all over France looting, harassing and basically raping whenever the mood strikes, all of which they seem to do under the all-forgiving eye of the director. Blier looks them as romantic rogues, bringing havoc on straight society, and he finds laughs in ways that no longer seem all that funny. The beautiful Miou-Miou, as the pair's co-hort and all-round fuckbunny, is treated like a piece of meat.

Why is it Pauline Kael went into raptures over this film but hated the way Stanley Kubtrick treated women in a Clockwork Orange or the way the murderous couple was supposedly lionized in Natural Born Killers?