From the director of the Academy Award winning Get Out You Handkerchiefs.


In French filmmaker Bertrand Blier's seriocomic Beau Pere, Ariel Besse plays a 14-year-old girl who is perversely attracted to her 30-year-old stepfather (Patrick Dewaere). Daddy fends off these unnatural attentions, but eventually gives in and allows himself to be seduced.


Beau-père is a 1981 French comedy-drama[1] film directed by Bertrand Blier. It is about a 30-year-old pianist who has an affair with his 14-year-old stepdaughter after her mother dies in a car accident. The film was entered into the 1981 Cannes Film Festival[2] and received some positive reviews in spite of its controversial subject.


The film had a total of 1,197,816 admissions in France. [6] The subject matter of an adult having sex with a minor caused the film to be shunned by film distributors in the US for over a year.[5]
The film has received positive reviews, with Rotten Tomatoes counting four favourable reviews out of five.[7] The Chicago Reader observes similarities to Lolita and says Beau Pere "has enough of Blier's customary taboo-busting vigor to provide a reasonably unsettling good time."[4] In his 2002 Movie & Video Guide, Leonard Maltin gives the film three and a half stars and calls it thoughtful and sensitive.[1] Janet Maslin of The New York Times wrote in 1981 that despite the objectionable subject matter, "Mr. Blier tells this story very gently, with as much attention to the humor of the situation as to its eroticism."[3] James Berardinelli of ReelViews credits the film with a "provocative script featuring well-defined characters and a pair of powerful performances."[5] People calls the film convincing and touching, and in spite of the topic, not pornographic.[8] Conversely, New York called the film "heavy-handed and sluggish."[9]
Beau Pere tied with Taxi zum Klo in winning the 1981 Boston Society of Film Critics Award for best foreign language film


Release Date: October 9, 1981


Distrib: New Line Cinema