Film Review
Guillaume Gallienne's may not be the most dignified of directorial
debuts but the actor certainly makes a splash as he lets us in on the
saucy secrets of his chronically confused adolescence. Adapting
his own one-man stage play (which played to packed houses from 2008 to
2010), Gallienne serves up a boisterous comedy that tries hard to say
something intelligent about gender identity but merely ends up getting
totally carried away by its own reckless exuberance. Attracting
an audience of 2.5 million in France,
Les
Garçons et Guillaume, à table was one of the most
popular French comedies of 2013, but popularity is no guide to
quality. More significant is the fact that the film was nominated
for ten Césars, a remarkable achievement for any first time
director.
Whilst he is yet to make a name for himself outside France, Guillaume
Gallienne is one of his country's most highly regarded actors. A
fully paid-up member of the esteemed Comédie française,
he has garnered acclaim both on stage and on screen, distinguishing
himself recently with an uncannily true-to-life portrayal of the
fashion entrepreneur Pierre Bergé in Jalil Lespert's
Yves Saint Laurent
(2014). Gallienne first discovered his talent for acting as a
teenager, when he took a perverse pleasure in imitating his domineering
aristocratic mother. No surprise then that he should play both
his mother and himself in his first feature as a director - a feat he
pulls of with effortless élan thanks to his skill as an actor
and the miracle of split-screen photography.
Thanks to his cutely effeminate mannerisms and naturally timid persona,
Gallienne has suffered his fair share of typecasting in films, too
easily assigned by unimaginative casting directors to gay character
roles. The fact that the 41-year old actor is a happily married
man with children naturally comes as a surprise, implying that we are
all afflicted with a tendency to pigeon-hole others according to how
they look and behave. In
Les
Garçons et Guillaume, à table Gallienne lets us in
on the anguish he suffered as a sexually confused adolescent, anguish
which was aggravated by other people's assumptions about his true
nature. Gallienne appears happy to laugh it off now but his
experiences as a closet heterosexual must have been profoundly
distressing, as can be glimpsed - all too fleetingly - in some of the
film's more introspective moments.
Gallienne's self-therapy consists of reducing his years of teenage
angst to a flamboyant 1970s-style sitcom, packed with the most
egregious accumulation of stereotypes and clichés
imaginable. Non-stop hilarious the film may be, profound and
subtle it certainly isn't. Gallienne's performances - note the
plural - are intoxicating in their hilarity but his work as a director
is far less impressive. The film essentially boils down to a
series of standalone sketches (most presumably lifted with little
modification from the original play), with the result that it bumps
along like a runaway train, with no clear destination in sight.
The humour is mostly on the low side, including the obligatory enema
gag and no shortage of crude gay archetypes. Political
correctness clearly was not in Gallienne's mind at any stage when he
made this film, and that is probably its main redeeming feature.
Les Garçons et Guillaume, à
table may struggle to get you to reflect on the serious gender
issues at its heart but it has no difficulty making you laugh.
© James Travers 2014
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Film Synopsis
Guillaume had a far from conventional childhood. When he was four
or five, his mother would call him into dinner by shouting: "Boys and
Guillaume, dinner's ready!" Guillaume knew there and then
that he was different from other boys, but he could never tell
how he was different. As he
grew up, he delighted in imitating his mother. Maybe he should
have been born a girl? A teenager, he finds himself attracted to
boys, but for some reason the boys he falls for have no interest in
him. It will take Guillaume a long time to discover who he really
is, and along the way there will be innumerable mishaps and
misunderstandings...
© James Travers
The above content is owned by filmsdefrance.com and must not be copied.