Une nouvelle amie (2014)
Directed by François Ozon

Film Review

Romain Duris gets in touch with his feminine side (and seems to enjoy it just a little too much...) in this latest over-seasoned genre-flitting potpourri from France's least predictable and most likeably scurrilous filmmaker, François Ozon.  Taking his cue from a Ruth Rendell short story entitled The New Girl Friend, Ozon crafts another cutely weird fairytale that rips open the all-too pristine carcass of bourgeois conformity to expose the festering morass of dark leanings and repressed desires that lie within.  Une nouvelle amie is a fair approximation to what we would expect to get if Pedro Almodóvar was minded to attempt a remake of Hitchcock's Vertigo - a darkly comedic gender-bending study in identity that convinces us that we'd all be better off if we traded in the lad's mags for mascara and began to nurture the female side of our nature.

The film begins as an overblown tribute to the director who has probably had most influence on Ozon, Douglas Sirk.  The laughably fustian writing and mise-en-scene, inflated to ludicrous proportions by some extravagant camera work, mawkish acting and a ridiculously overdone score, thrusts us into the soppy midsts of a classic American soap, but like Sirk, Ozon appropriates this elaborate artifice only so that he can later tear it apart like confetti and reveal the deeper realities of life that lie beneath.  Once, like the characters in a children's fantasy, we have passed through the 'magic door' (as the heroine does ten minutes into the film) we enter a completely different realm - one where synthetic sentiment is suddenly kicked down a mineshaft and genuine human desires and impulses take over.  Welcome to Ozon's world.

Even before we get to this point we know that the two main characters David and Claire (portrayed with surprising subtlety by Romain Duris and Anaïs Demoustier) are bound to become romantically entwined.  But what Ozon serves up is poles apart from the conventional unfaithful wife scenario.  Un(e) nouvel(le) ami(e) - which is how the film should have been titled - turns out to be a bold and perceptive exploration of gender identity, in which both of the main characters are revitalised by a willingness to embrace the feminine side of their persona.  Claire is initially drawn to David not by the idea of romance but to find a friend to replace the one she has lost.  Once Claire has got over the initial shock of seeing him made up as a woman,  David's willingness to dress up in women's clothing helps to restore the equilibrium in her life.  Cross-dressing also turns out to be a vital therapy for David, allowing him to keep alive the memory of the woman who was taken from him in such tragic circumstances.  David and Claire becomes substitutes for the dead woman in each other's eyes, and as a result both are revived and transformed for the better by an awareness of their own innate femininity.  It's no crime to be a woman, even in 2014.

The perverse fairytale shifts into darker, more noticeably Hitchcockian, territory in its later passages as the happily feminised protagonists come up against the ugly macho tendencies of the real world.  Raphaël Personnazs' Gilles, the jealous husband, epitomises the latter and makes an effective contrast with the other two principal characters, although Ozon (being Ozon) soon has us wondering whether Gilles isn't himself susceptible to some slight deviations from the perpendicular.  Ambiguity is piled upon ambiguity as the film screeches towards its typically Ozon-esque grande finale, with a dream sequence that takes us even deeper into the labyrinth of subconscious desires.  Une nouvelle amie is as engaging and subtly subversive as any previous film made by François Ozon but it feels curiously unfinished, as if several pieces of the jigsaw have been lost along the way.  The tidy resolution of Rendell's original story is substituted for something far more opaque and perplexing, but whilst we may quibble about the lack of a neat ending, the film is one that can hardly fail to grab your attention.  Slick and ballsy, in a feminine sort of way, this has to be Ozon's most committed study in identity to date.

Film Synopsis

A comfortably situated housewife,  Claire falls into a deep depression when her best friend, Laura, is struck down by a terminal illness.  After her friend's death, Claire finds herself drawn to Laura's widowed husband, David, who is left to bring up their baby daughter alone.  One day, Claire makes an impromptu call on David at his home and is horrified to find him dressed up as a woman in Laura's clothes.  David confesses that before he married he had cross-dressing tendencies and after his wife's death he has resumed the habit to help ease the pain of his bereavement.  This bizarre revelation helps to cement Claire and David's friendship and they both discover a new lease of life, with David more than willing to play a girlfriend substitute for Laura.  Claire's husband Gilles soon notices the dramatic transformation in his wife and begins to suspect she may be having an affair...