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When one watches La Moustache, one immediately thinks of (at least this critic did) Cédric Kahn's Red Lights, a similarly subtle, yet quite a bit more sinister French thriller from a few years back. Red Lights too had a pretentious preponderance toward some sort of nouveau Hitchcockian sensibility. The main difference between the two films - other than La Moustache being a much more enjoyable film to watch and, even with its macguffin-filled plot, a much more plausible film as a whole - is the level, or deepness of their sinisterness. While Red Lights is like Hitchcock meets Gaspar Noé - complete with the borrowing of Noé's shock-over-substance filmmaking style (a style that works when Noé applies it but not when most others do), La Moustache is more Hitchcock meets Jacquot - a quieter, yet still subtly sinister, melancholy dream piece.
Of course comparing La Moustache, and its director, Emmanuel Carrère, to the works of either Hitchcock or Jacquot (and the same can be said of any comparison of Red Lights and Gaspar Noé) is not exactly tantamount to any sort of real critical analysis or theoretical consideration on the film itself, outside of any historical this-and-that, Auteurist manner of contemplation - which is exactly the manner of analysis I tend to overemphasize when the film in question speaks more to itself than to I.
Meanwhile, back at a more sensible arena of critique, La Moustache is the story of Marc who impulsively shaves off the moustache he has had most of his adult life after Agnès, his wife casually mentions that she has never seen him without it. Once his Agnès makes no mention of his deed - and his friends and co-workers follow suit - Marc believes he may be going insane. Little by little his world is whittled away until, in total dread, he runs off into the rain, and hops on a plane for Hong Kong.
Played with a brilliantly understated malaise by Vincent Lindon, Marc - almost as if taken over by a lost and bewildered muse - is calmly going mad on the outside while completely going mad on the inside. Unable to cope with what may or may not be happening to him, Marc is seemingly caught in a circle of confusion - an effect highlighted in a workmanlike maddening ten-minute sequence where he rides a ferry back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and back and forth from one port to another and back to the other, and we seem to be going mad right with him throughout his tedious, ever-tightening circulatory of similarily eye-riveting shots. And the entire time we are unable to look away (not that this somewhat OCD-afflicted critic ever does) for fear of possibly missing out on the inevitable climax to his caged-animal-like circular wanderings, knowing that eventually he must break free of this rotation or go completely mad in the procession of it.
In the end, the questions that were there during Red Lights are here as well - the only difference being that now they actually make sense to ask. We may never know the outcome of Marc's madness - if he was ever even mad in the first place - but closure never really matters as much as the questions we are left with.
- June 11, 2006
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