Nettoyage à sec

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.

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.

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.

An interesting and somewhat mysterious tale of a middle aged couple who grow disillusioned with their dry cleaning business and find outlet with a cross dressing brother-sister-lover couple of performers. Their mutual obsession naturally leads to the demise of their relationships, businesses and ultimately their lives.

The script is a bit dry, and lacks the punch that the subject matter is capable of delivering. Near the final act it tries to catch up as the homosexual attraction between the young man and the older husband comes zooming out of nowhere. A good editor would've suggested they drop some kind of hint earlier on.

The abrupt and troubling ending leaves you satisfied.

Saw a humongously uninspired French movie, Dry Cleaning (Nettoyage a Sec), that the advertisers swear won Cesar awards all over the place, but is just a hodgepodge of every foreign movie cliche that might strike an upscale audience as profound: a sexually ambiguous stranger insinuates himself into the lives of a married couple, engaging them in sexual games that bring them to the brink of self-destruction. She's desolate without the young man; the husband wrestles with his denial that he's also turned on by the stranger. Of course this is "art theatre," so we are to suppose that every straight man is really a gay man who hasn't found out yet. On the other hand the homosexual aspect of the story becomes the vehicle that carries the husband into his own corner of hell, an idea that seemed arty thirty-odd years ago (The Sergeant; The Children's Hour) but now is just insulting to gays. And of course the story is dotted with major and minor sexual interludes and taunts, but relationships are left to angry, dissatisfying silences between not-particularly-interesting characters. Story elements are offered that suggest the plot could go somewhere else but instead lead nowhere (the young man's sister leaves and conceivably might return looking for him; the young man has genuine talent as a dry-cleaner and might make a life for himself beyond his "drifter" existence; the married couple thinks about moving to Canada). I think the filmmaker has a long way to go in justifying why he wanted to make this movie -- what he thought would make this film extraordinary compared to some other story about dissolving marriage or sexual curiosity. Imagine La Strada if Anthony Quinn just sat around and brooded. If Thomas Mann had written Dry Cleaning it would be called Death in Suburbia: except that, speaking strictly for myself, I think it's the audience that dies.