La Moustache (2005)
Directed by Emmanuel Carrère

Film Review

One of the more abstruse French films of 2005 was this playfully unfathomable second feature from Emmanuel Carrère, a former journalist and successful writer who adapts one of his novels. Carrère made his directorial debut in 2003 with the acclaimed documentary Retour à Kotelnitch.  Two of his other novels have previously been adapted for French cinema: La Classe de neige (1998) by Claude Miller and L'Adversaire (2002) by Nicole Garcia. La Moustache is an altogether different kind of film, a dark and diffuse variation on the mid-life crisis theme in which the central protagonist (a superb Vincent Lindon) finds his grip on reality being snatched away from him when, on a whim, he decides to shave off his moustache.

Lindon is understandably not amused when no one, not even his devoted partner, notices the change in his facial appearance. This seemingly trivial incident turns out to be the trigger for a dramatic psychological onslaught. Lindon's certainties shaken, a full-blown mental meltdown is soon on its way and our de-moustached hero finds himself increasingly unable to differentiate between reality and imagination, past and present.

It is the kind of film that Alain Resnais has been making for years but Carrère comes at it from a fresh and quite unnerving angle, forcing us to feel the hellish anguish of a man whose whole reality is crumbling about him without giving us the comfort of a nice tidy resolution. What La Moustache offers is an uncomfortable journey on the wafer-thin isthmus between sanity and madness, of the kind that might well have been concocted by Marguerite Duras and Marcel Proust whilst under the influence of psychotropic drugs. It is a film that seemingly revels in its perplexing hopping between alternate realities - and yet for all that it is a singularly absorbing piece of cinema.

Film Synopsis

One evening, whilst getting ready for a dinner date,  Marc takes the momentous decision to shave off his moustache.  To his surprise, his wife Agnès fails to see any change in his appearance, and neither do the two friends they spend the evening with.   When Marc later challenges his wife, she is adamant that she has never seen him with a moustache.  In desperation, Marc searches through their collection of photos and finds a set of holiday snaps in which he clearly has a moustache.  But before he can show the photographs to Agnès they mysteriously disappear.   Is Marc going mad or is he the victim of an elaborate intrigue...?