Le Mari de la coiffeuse (1990) - film review

Antoine looks back on his life and recalls his childhood, which was marked by two events.  The first was having to wear woollen swimming trunks knitted for him by his mother.  The second was his lustful obsession with the plump hairdresser Madame Sheaffer.  Since, he has had one objective in his life: to marry a hairdresser.  Thirty years on, he meets Mathilde, who runs her own hairesser’s salon.  After she has cut his hair for the first time, Antoine asks her to marry him.  The next time he sees her, to his surprise, she accepts.  For a while, they enjoy a blissful happy union, in an idyllic world of their own creation.  But then Antoine begins to suspect that tragedy will tear them apart...

Le mari de la coiffeuse,  one of Patrice Leconte’s best films, is a delicate existentialist portrait of passion, in which the need to love and be loved is shown to be every bit as vital as eating and breathing.  The sumptuous moody photography conveys a whole range of conflicting moods, drawing the spectator willingly into the emotionally insecure but irresistible universe of a hairdresser and her husband.

The golden sunlight of idyllic happiness which bathes much of the film hides but does not obliterate the shadow of tragedy which surfaces towards the end.  The unusual and compelling cinematography transforms a barren narrative into a stunning work of art, one in which Jean Rochefort and Anna Galiena mesmerise us, playing a couple whose sole desire is to live for love and for love alone.  An evocative and haunting work which will have a marked effect on anyone who watches it.

© James Travers 2001

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