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La Moustache
I can only see myself through your eyes
2005
Review: June 16, 2006
Director: Emmanuel Carrère
Starring: Vincent Lindon, Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric, Hippolyte Girardot, Cylia Malki
I wouldn’t.
THE SETUP:
Guy shaves off his mustache. No one notices.
DISCUSSION:
Me and my friend have a few genres of films that we always end up seeing, like “foriegn girls who end up in bad sexual trouble” like Lila Says or Somersault, and another popular choice is “mysteriously oblique French mysteries” like Red Lights or Cache. He wanted to go see The Proposition, but I lobbied fairly hard for La Moustache, which sounded like a bit of a disappointment, but also kind of interesting. Which is exactly how it turned out to be.
So this guy Marc asks his wife, first thing, what she would think if he shaved off his mustache. She says “I don’t think I would know you without it.” He shaves. But when he comes out his wife doesn’t say anything, and it seems like she doesn’t notice it. They go over to another couples’ [the male of which used to be Marc’s wife Agnes’ husband], and they don’t notice either. Marc gets annoyed about it with his wife on the way home, but she truly claims not to know what he’s talking about, and gets a little freaked out.
So Marc goes into work, where his co-workers don’t notice either. He goes home and finds a bunch of pictures that clearly show him with the mustache, but he doesn’t show them to his wife. He starts smoking again, which his wife says is “disgusting.” The next day she recommends he buy this hideous jacket with a leaf pattern on it, and SHE starts smoking again. She is worried that her husband is going insane, but since the movie is told from Marc’s perspective, one naturally sides with him and wonders: “Is she gaslighting him?”
All of this to the accompaniment of Philip Glass, by the way.
Soon enough Agnes doesn’t remember the couple they had dinner with two nights before. Then Marc receives a message from his father, and a few minutes later Agnes tells him that his father has been dead for years.
SPOILERS > > >
I’m going to tell you the ending of the movie now, so if you want to see it you have been warned. Marc takes a sleeping pill one day and hears his wife and his friend from work saying the people from the mental hospital will be coming to take him away [ha! ha!] in a few minutes. He escapes and eventually goes to HONG KONG.
Once there, he takes the ferry back and forth and back and forth across the harbor all the live-long day. Then he goes back to his hotel, and surprise! His wife is there. They seem to have some sort of reconciliation, and it goes on for a while until the movie ends. So it seems that the entire movie is Marc going insane, but since it’s from his perspective, we are as lost as he is.
< < < SPOILERS END
It was interesting, but after a while, when you start to realize that you are really NEVER going to get any answers, one starts to lose energy in trying to pay attention. Thankfully it was only 80 minutes. At one point Marc says something to the effect of “I can only see myself through your eyes,” which is interesting considering how rigidly we stay in Marc’s perspective throughout the movie, and also—is his problem happening because Agnes didn’t recognize it? Intriguing questions, and one you won’t get answers to.
I would not be surprised to learn that there is something greater at work here and I wholly missed it all. I also would not be surprised to find out that nope, it’s exactly what I thought it was and for some reason it got released over here. It was interesting for a while, and I am in no way sorry I saw it, but in retrospect, maybe we should have done The Proposition.
SHOULD YOU WATCH IT?
If you want, though I suspect you probably won’t be entirely happy you did.
