The Moustache

This movie is a prime example of how the simplest things can mushroom out of control. Architect Marc (Vincent Lindon) has had a moustache since he was knee high to a blueprint and it is, he feels, part of him, then he takes it into his head to speculate on just how much he is identified via the moustache. He starts by asking his live-in lover Agnes (Manu Devos) whether she would still fancy him sans moustache; since she's only known him with it she can't answer. So, out comes the razor and THEN comes the uneasiness that segues into genuine fright. Not only does Devos not notice the difference but neither do their friends and his colleagues at work. We are now on the fringes of a Kafkaesque scenario which isn't really resolved satisfactorily. For reasons that eluded me Marc, by now convinced that Devos has some hidden agenda he can't fathom, lights out for Hong Kong literally in just the clothes he stands up in and spends a few days - weeks, months? - riding the ferry before Devos shows up, or does she? For one thing how did she know where he was and/or track him down to the fleabag where's he's taken a room. Lots of food for thought here and the acting is out of the right bottle if anybody asks you.

I saw the movie at the Melwood Screening room in Pittsburgh, PA so indeed the film made it the USA.

The movie held my interest throughout but in the end it was unsatisfying because it continued to create loose ends throughout without ever weaving them back together. You could argue that that was intentional, that the viewer was supposed to draw their own conclusions. But, given that real life so often presents unknowable people and events, a film is an opportunity to see things through. mho.

A few things I wondered about: At the end of the movie, his wife mysteriously appears in his south Asian hotel and acts as if nothing is strange about that. As if they had been there together the while time. They make love and then he wakes. It's not clear if she was still there and he's alone. But, just prior to bed, she had suggested he shave his mustache and he does. And she acknowledges him shaving it. That acknowledgment seemed satisfying to him.

Some people, mostly strangers seemed to recognize from photos that he had had a mustache. But all the closest friends denied him ever having had one. Seems too much to believe that he had had one and so he seems crazy. But, they might be in collusion. The film doesn't providing any motif for that collusion.

Borrowing a few techniques from the likes of Lynch or Haneke, La Moustache presents an engaging but intentionally confusing story of one man's facial hair and the strange series of events that are set off once that hairy upper lip was removed. Acting as a catalyst in this bizarrely written mystery, The Moustache really plays better as psychological drama then the semi-ludicrous, detail-specific, identity riddle it's seductive direction and powerful performances wooed us into believing. Guided by typical cornerstones of praised European fare, this film, as stubborn or illogical as it may be, is punctuated by the restrained and observant direction of it's original novelist Emmanuel Carrère, and crowned by the masterfully human performance Vincent Lindon imbues this difficult character. When the final credits have rolled, many will be left scratching their heads, already forming diverging conclusions as to what this movie actually had to say. Though there seemed to be too much left to speculation with too many plot holes to justify everything I saw, this was still a compelling mistake at worst and is still worth taking the shave even if the final result feels more pretentiously derivative then compellingly original.

"The Moustache" is a comedy that, starting from the most trivial of pretexts, quickly turns into a true Kafkian nightmare. A man shaves his mustache. No one seems to notice, and in a surrealistic parody of male mid-life crisis this causes conflict, pain and uncertainty. But more and more threads come undone in the fabric of his reality.

Excellent self-adaptation of a short novel by Emmanuel Carrère, La Moustache delivers the spectator with much more than it promises, in these days a rare occurrence indeed. Vincent Lindon as the troubled protagonist is good and measured, and the movie has an excellent pace and nothing is overdone. Even the theme, a Philip Glass "Concerto pour violon et orchestre" could not be more effective. Will we ever see this movie in the USA? Maybe in a parallel reality.

LA MOUSTACHE forces the viewer to grapple with a conundrum; "What is real, and what is not?". Carrere (who wrote the novel and directed the film) is a writer and fan of the late, great science fiction author, Philip K. Dick. In fact, Carrere's, I AM ALIVE AND YOU ARE DEAD:A JOURNEY INTO THE LIFE OF PHILIP K. DICK is an excellent biography of this gifted author. Nearly all of Dick's work concerned the shifting nature of Identity and the ontological basis for Reality. This movie examines the possibility of "Change"-shaving a moustache, and the impact on a life. In a sense, the film is kind of a Black Comedy, in that such a minor adjustment would not seem to lead to such dislocation. But, that is not the case in La Moustache. The movie begs all kinds of bizarre interpretations, so don't expect an easy ride from this French 'Chinese Puzzle' of a film,