Nettoyage à sec

In a small town in France, Nicole Kunstler (Miou-Miou) and her husband Jean-Marie Kunstler is a traditional French middle-class couple, bored with their years of marriage and running a small business of cleaning and ironing clothes with some financial difficulties. When they meet the bisexual Loic (Stanislas Merhar) working as drag in a night-club with his sister Marylin (Mathilde Seigner), the sexually dissatisfied Nicole feels a great sexual attraction for him. The couple brings the young man to live and work with them, in a weird relationship, and Nicole has an affair with Loic and becomes a happy person. This intriguing triangle of love has a tragic end. "Nettoyage à Sec" is almost an excellent romance. The screenplay begins very daring, but the solution for the love situation is very moralist and resolved in a tragic, but easy way. The cast has a great performance and the direction is very good, but the story deserved a better conclusion. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Lavagem a Seco" ("Dry Cleaning")

Recently i watched some or many french movies about husband n wife relationship. i really dont understand or what i understand that what the hek is going on with french people? . or maybe its just movies. as movies represent its people too.

A movie about married couple with 2 kids and BOTH very busy with their dry cleaning business. seems normal till they enjoyed much in EXOTIC club. and then another young stud character came in their lives + home. which turns everything upside.

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the thing i dont understand is , a normal French married couple SUDDENLY invite a GIGLO to their business + home + lives after soo many years of marriage. even that young giglo has its own intentions to that couple after being dumped by his own gf. even a husband knows from a start that he WANTS and is getting into his wife pants but still OK with it ? . and that french wife? . she didnt think about her own children n family and suddenly want to leave everything for that guy. that is kinda too much.

never ever invite a horny young guy into home where a bored housewife is already on heat.

It's a cinematic tradition: the handsome young man who insinuates himself into a household of boring bourgeois types and stirs things up. Terence Stamp did it in Teorema, Robert Forster in Reflections in a Golden Eye, Peter McEnery in Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Will Smith in Six Degrees of Separation. Here, the young man is a bisexual who quickly wins the heart of a frustrated Miou-Miou and disturbs the dull, penny-pinching boss of a dry cleaners, Berling. The script and direction by Anne Fontaine are assured, but the ending may leave some viewers perplexed (it did me), as it seems to come out of nowhere.

Stanislas Merhar deserved the Most Promising Actor Cesar that he won as the pretty boy; you can readily see why the wife can't get enough of his caresses. Charles Berling often plays men who suffer in silence; he has a wonderful way of tightening his mouth that speaks volumes, and here he's very good as the husband.

To me, a romantically inclined gay man, this was a fascinating but ultimately unfulfilling tale of a `normal' French couple, Nicole and Jean-Marie Kunstler, who have grown unsatisfied with their settled, routine lives. The couple runs a dry cleaning business in an unexciting small French town. Their lives change when they go to a bar with some business associates and encounter Loïc and Marylin, a cross dressing brother/sister act. From the first, the couple is fascinated with the pair but particularly with Loïc, the sexually ambiguous brother, (played to perfection by Stanislas Merhar).

The couple is so enchanted with the pair that they take a weekend to the city where the performers are appearing next. When the sister decides to end the act and run away with her lover, the brother insinuates himself into the couples lives. The young man claims to be, and is by all indications, straight and soon takes the wife as a lover. The husband is also aroused by the boy but denies his attraction. Soon the boy is living in the couple's home and working in the Dry Cleaning shop and is showing a talent for that type of work. He even befriends the couple's child and helps him with homework and takes him skating.

Whether his good work arises from Loïc's desire to repay Jean-Marie or from some innate talent for dry cleaning is unclear. I think that Loïc feels guilty about cuckolding this man who has shown him nothing but kindness, genuinely likes the guy, and is aware of the man's attraction to him. He wants to make amends in any way that he can. Ultimately Loïc offers himself to Jean-Marie physically but is rebuffed.

Whether it's the husband's `homosexual panic' or his actually seeing his wife with Loïc during one of their trysts, Jean-Marie decides that Loïc must go. This leads to the final and I think dissatisfying concluding scenes.

This story of a French couple, middle class business people leading a life that they only find boring when they encounter a young, free spirited and unisexual man, takes some weird turns but does it with excellent performances and direction. Though the ending was a bit abrupt, as well as shocking, getting there was the fun - well, pleasure, maybe. The young man has an affair with the woman, and is clearly drawn toward the man as while. The husband's reaction is the key to the drama, and the actor's subtle signs of being tempted, against his nature and resisting all the way , are truly fine acting. The whole cast is excellent, and the sensual , open tone of the movie, mixing the fairly straight-laced couple, their young child, middle class friends and family, and the worldly young man and depicting them, ultimately, as not really all that different, is almost comforting...until that ending, which came rather fast and furious after a more slow moving development, shattering the mood. Still, this is a really fine job of direction, and development of characters who all seem far more common than we would think if merely being told about them.