Sans queue ni tête (2010) - film review

Alice is a prostitute who can no longer stand her clients.  She decides that what she needs is a course of psychiatry, to give her a new direction in life.  Xavier is a psychoanalyst who is tired of listening to the couch soliloquies of his patients.  When his wife leaves him, he realises that what he needs are the services of a prostitute.  Alice and Xavier’s meeting would seem to be providential...

The parallels between psychiatry and prostitution are so easily drawn that it’s a wonder no one has yet devised a sitcom based on this very fact. Director Jeanne Labrune’s attempts to make the connection between the world’s oldest profession and another popular couch-related activity that comes with a high price tag are a little grating at first, but all is forgiven when we become aware of the serious subtext that lies beneath the seemingly facile surface.   Heavily dowsed in low grade sex comedy humour (of the kind that makes ’Allo ’Allo! look as though it was written by Ionesco in one of his more inspired periods), Sans queue ni tête doesn’t play the subtlety card too liberally and, at times, you could easily mistake it for a militant feminist send-up of a Woody Allen film.  However, anyone familiar with Jeanne Labrune’s previous films - which range from the viscerally intense romantic drama Si je t’aime, prends garde à toi (1998) to the quirky comedy Ça ira mieux demain (2000) - will have sufficient faith in the director to know that there is a good deal more to this film than first meets the eye.  Far from being the vapid comedy it initially appears to be, this is actually a thoughtful piece of commentary on one of the great social malaises of our time - namely how the consumerist mindset devalues human relationships and prevents us from having fulfilling and purposeful lives.

Isabelle Huppert is the obvious casting choice for the lead female character, a prostitute with the mother of all mind-care problems, and the part certainly fits within her repertoire of feisty nymphettes trapped in the body of an inscrutable middle-aged woman.  As she works her way through a dazzling variety of wigs and costumes (including a libido-firing schoolgirl outfit), Huppert certainly presses all of the right buttons and she has no difficulty engaging our sympathies as the fault lines in her character’s psychology become frighteningly apparent.  Bouli Lanners, her talented co-star, is equally well-cast as the pent-up psychiatrist who sees a dose of commercial sex as the solution to his own existential crisis, but his efforts are somewhat frustrated by some obvious weaknesses in the screenwriting which periodically make him look like a freakish caricature.

Jeanne Labrunne begins with an excellent premise and has no difficulty getting her humane message across, albeit in a way that is at times a tad inelegant and demonstrative.  At a superficial level, Sans queue ni tête is a film that is both enjoyable and pleasingly provocative, although the humour is probably what might generously be termed an acquired taste (the transsexual gags are so old they should be in the British Museum, somewhere between the Egyptian relics and the Elgin Marbles).  Whilst the film engages with some serious themes with insight and genuine concern (offering a timely indictment of the way in which consumerism may be eroding the most essential aspects of our humanity), its impact is slightly lessened by its strident tone and a careless smattering of clichés.

© James Travers 2011

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