La Moustache (2005) - film review

One evening, whilst getting ready for a dinner date,  Marc takes the momentous decision to shave off his moustache.  To his surprise, his wife Agnès fails to see any change in his appearance, and neither do the two friends they spend the evening with.   When Marc later challenges his wife, she is adamant that she has never seen him with a moustache.  In desperation, Marc searches through their collection of photos and finds a set of holiday snaps in which he clearly has a moustache.  But before he can show the photographs to Agnès they mysteriously disappear.   Is Marc going mad or is he the victim of an elaborate intrigue...?

La Moustache is one of those film d’auteur oddities which is totally lacking in logic and coherence and yet still manages to be utterly compelling. Its underlying themes, textual ambiguities and enigmatic poetry evoke something of the work of Marguerite Duras and Alain Resnais.  This is the second film to be directed by Emmanuel Carrère, one-time journalist and successful writer, based on one of his own novels.   Carrère made his directorial debut with the acclaimed documentary Retour à Kotelnitch (2003).  Two of his other novels have previously been adapted for French cinema: La Classe de neige (1998) and L’Adversaire (2002).

What makes La Moustache so fascinating is that it brazenly acknowledges its narrative inconsistencies and presents these in a way which forces us to accept them as reality.  It is as if two parallel universes have somehow managed to get themselves entwined, so that the central character (superbly portrayed by Vincent Lindon) finds himself flitting between two contradictory realities, struggling to make sense of it all.  (You can get much the same effect by knocking back half a dozen bottles of Bacardi Breezer.)   If the film says anything it is that there is no such thing as a concrete objective reality – everything is a matter of interpretation, nothing is certain, and perhaps none of it really does exist.   We are such stuff as dreams are made on (Emmanuelle Devos doubly so).

© filmsdefrance.com 2008

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