Que faisaient les femmes pendant que l’homme marchait sur la lune? (2000) - film review

Sacha Kessler is a young Belgian woman who is in a terrible quandary.  Her lesbian lover Odile has given her an ultimatum: unless she comes out of the closet, and tells her family that she is in a settled relationship with another woman, the affair will be over.  It is July 1969 and Sacha must make up her mind before man first sets foot on the moon.  The problem is that not only is Sacha gay, she has also abandoned her medical studies in Canada to follow her dream career as a photographer.  Just how can she break the news to her mother that all her years of saving and scrimping to earn her daughter a doctor’s certificate have been in vain?  And how will her mother react when she learns that the day she has long been waiting for, the day she gets to see her daughter in a wedding dress beside a virile young man, will never come?   Surely this double shock will kill her?  Sacha has no choice.  As the astronauts board Apollo 11 on the eve of a truly historic day, she must head back to her home in Belgian, for an encounter which, for her and her family, could be just as momentous as mankind’s first rendezvous with the moon.  But as Sacha soon discovers, she is not the only member of her family who has secrets to air...

Having notched up a triumph with her script for the award winning Ma vie en rose (1997), Belgian screenwriter Chris Vander Stappen went on to make her directing debut with a film that is every bit as idiosyncratic and insightful.  Que faisaient les femmes pendant que l’homme marchait sur la lune? is a quirkily barbed satire which, with an unmistakably feminine voice, finds humour and pathos in the notion that a family is a group of people who live together almost as complete strangers, each oblivious to the true nature of those with whom they share a roof and genetic bond.  The central character, a feisty lesbian who is fighting a losing battle to smash her way out of a lead-reinforced closet, is as ignorant of the personal crises which presently afflict her mother, sister and grandmother, as they are of hers.  Such is the jumping-off point for a cogent morality tale that is red in tooth and claw, and at times deliriously funny.

It isn’t so much a dysfunctional family that the film presents us with as a totally disunited family, a collection of individuals who are all hermetically sealed in their own little bubbles, incapable of making themselves heard or of understanding those who sit beside them at the breakfast table.  They may live in the same house but they exist in parallel, completely unconnected universes, unaware of what anyone else is thinking or feeling, daily enacting the same pointless rituals behind the same life-strangling chintz curtains.  The fact that everyone’s attention has been seized by portentous news reports of the first lunar landing can only exacerbate this sense of disconnection.  Not only can no one speak in the Kessler household; no one is minded to listen.  And so the tensions and anxieties slowly grow, unheeded like the unseen cancer that will claim one member of the family.  When the moment of cathartic release comes, in an avalanche of emotion, it does so just as Neil Armstrong sets foot on the moon and fluffs his own message for posterity.  How easier it is to listen to a dismbodied voice from an inarticulate stranger on a dead lump of rock four hundred thousand kilometres away than to someone sitting right next to you on the living room settee!      

Que faisaient les femmes... is a film that is both engaging, through its rich character portrayals and slightly twisted (characteristically Belgian) humour, and acutely poignant.  Its messages are ones that we can all relate to, specifically the virtue of making the effort to allow our nearest and (presumably) dearest to open up to us instead of merely regarding them as an adjunct to the home furnishings.  Chris Vander Stappen’s direction isn’t quite as inspired as her writing but, with the support of a magnificent ensemble of acting talent, she gives us a film that is both wise and charming, and one which deserves to be far better known and appreciated than it currently is.  Marie Bunuel’s portrayal of a young woman frantically struggling to assert her identity is as moving as it is comical, whilst Hélène Vincent’s similarly tragicomic portrayal of the mother who is a slave to her own petit bourgeois delusions is almost heartbreaking to watch.  Equally delightful are Mimie Mathy, who is superb as the dwarf sister who (when she is not tormenting her pet goldfish) has her own quest for identity to pursue, and Tsilla Chelton who steals every scene as the sugar-sweet grandmother pining away for a love that will never come - quite a contrast to her portrayal of septuagenarian nastiness in Etienne Chatiliez’s Tatie Danielle (1990).  Like a richly fragrant Belgian chocolate, this is a film to savour.

© filmsdefrance.com 2011

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