Une Nouvelle Amie (The New Girlfriend)
A sexually twisted movie about fluidity of gender identity,
from François Ozon.
The film whose socioeconomic backdrop — which, of course, wasn’t the main point of the movie — was fairly cinematic in an uncritical embrace of bourgeois life. Concerned with private social lives of comfortably middle-class, complacent and suburban people (admittedly, suburban settings of American variety aren’t that common in French cinema). Specimens who don’t bother to be much invested in work or nurture any interests/hobbies or passions of their own. Which is a bummer, because leisure of moneyed folks doesn’t only have to consist of navigating social relationships in close friendly circles. Work here was an afterthought (cue: the working husband speaking only in banalities when home or at a night out — a walking movie cliché). Homes were spacious and fully supplied (with sexy red sports cars in garages), clothing tasteful, manners gently cultivated, everything seemingly well-adjusted. Other than that, you can accept that this tongue-in-cheek relationship movie focused solely on emotional entanglements of one married couple and its cross-dressing widowed friend who starts courting drama. The relation between those four people (before one of the wives died) was established in a pleasantly economic, swift manner, through an initial sequence of few words and much visual exposition.
A rather delicious, emotionally transparent, generously available performance by Anaïs Demoustier, as a melancholic and douce woman, perhaps even a closeted dyke (her sexual orientation was never fully clear, which of course made for a spicier cinema). Every reaction of hers was immediately scannable from her freckled face. Her behavior reminded one of Dakota Johnson’s in Fifty Shades of Grey. The same kind of facial timidity and an undergoing sexual rediscovery (cue the scene where she checked out her breasts). Romain Duris’ feminine acting sometimes stretched, tested the limits of transsexual portraiture— even if you call yourself tolerant and empathetic. His mannerisms in drag were hopelessly unbridled, even all-out goofy, in their theatrical embrace of a (cartoonishly constructed) gender identity. For him, being a woman meant shopping and prettying up, and being a man was about chopping wood and playing tennis well. These sorts of preconceptions —a charming and intelligent person he was, indeed. Demoustier’s lying to her filmic husband about the times when she was meeting their cross-dressing friend (dubbed ‘Virginia’) was a constant source of humor and complications. Things got more interesting (and melodramatic) when the relationship turned somehow romantic, and the truth about the nature of a friendship between Demoustier and Dumas’ wife (lifelong friends they were) was unveiled.
Among the film’s funniest bits: a reaction of a mother of the deceased wife to Dumas, who was seen gesturing like a femme, in oblivion. Other curiosities: a scene that explained when exactly Duris rekindled his cross-dressing habit —in a morgue, when covering his naked wife’s corpse with a robe. Weird was the fact that Laura (that dead wife) had her own portrait painting, mounted in a countryside mansion, as if she were some kind of royalty.
Cinematography was of French bourgeois quality — it looked exactly like any other François Ozon’s film. Elegantly framed with static shots; possessing undistorted, pleasant hues—nothing spectacular or out of genteel conventions. One appreciates that the film casually contained a brief shot of the erect penis (only its upper part, a glans) — as you’d expect from a proper French movie. Sex scenes were brief, sensual and functional, as usual in Ozon’s oeuvre. They came rewardingly varied and informative — one showed a pushy intercourse between a husband and a wife, an uncommon session for them; another was a dream sequence that established the heroine as a part-time lesbian; yet another was an imagined gay sex with male protagonists in a public shower (this was funny); the last offered the novelty of seeing a foreplay between a woman and a man in drag. Elsewhere, a delectable cameo of Ozon the man himself, in as scene where he amusingly frisked Duris in a cinema. The film had its own, distinctive sense of humor.
