Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table (2013)
Directed by Guillaume Gallienne

Film Review

Guillaume Gallienne's may not be the most dignified of directorial debuts but the actor certainly makes a splash as he lets us in on the saucy secrets of his chronically confused adolescence.  Adapting his own one-man stage play (which played to packed houses from 2008 to 2010), Gallienne serves up a boisterous comedy that tries hard to say something intelligent about gender identity but merely ends up getting totally carried away by its own reckless exuberance.  Attracting an audience of 2.5 million in France, Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table was one of the most popular French comedies of 2013, but popularity is no guide to quality.  More significant is the fact that the film was nominated for ten Césars, a remarkable achievement for any first time director.

Whilst he is yet to make a name for himself outside France, Guillaume Gallienne is one of his country's most highly regarded actors.  A fully paid-up member of the esteemed Comédie française, he has garnered acclaim both on stage and on screen, distinguishing himself recently with an uncannily true-to-life portrayal of the fashion entrepreneur Pierre Bergé in Jalil Lespert's Yves Saint Laurent (2014).  Gallienne first discovered his talent for acting as a teenager, when he took a perverse pleasure in imitating his domineering aristocratic mother.  No surprise then that he should play both his mother and himself in his first feature as a director - a feat he pulls of with effortless élan thanks to his skill as an actor and the miracle of split-screen photography.

Thanks to his cutely effeminate mannerisms and naturally timid persona, Gallienne has suffered his fair share of typecasting in films, too easily assigned by unimaginative casting directors to gay character roles.  The fact that the 41-year old actor is a happily married man with children naturally comes as a surprise, implying that we are all afflicted with a tendency to pigeon-hole others according to how they look and behave.  In Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table Gallienne lets us in on the anguish he suffered as a sexually confused adolescent, anguish which was aggravated by other people's assumptions about his true nature.  Gallienne appears happy to laugh it off now but his experiences as a closet heterosexual must have been profoundly distressing, as can be glimpsed - all too fleetingly - in some of the film's more introspective moments.

Gallienne's self-therapy consists of reducing his years of teenage angst to a flamboyant 1970s-style sitcom, packed with the most egregious accumulation of stereotypes and clichés imaginable.  Non-stop hilarious the film may be, profound and subtle it certainly isn't.  Gallienne's performances - note the plural - are intoxicating in their hilarity but his work as a director is far less impressive.  The film essentially boils down to a series of standalone sketches (most presumably lifted with little modification from the original play), with the result that it bumps along like a runaway train, with no clear destination in sight.  The humour is mostly on the low side, including the obligatory enema gag  and no shortage of crude gay archetypes.  Political correctness clearly was not in Gallienne's mind at any stage when he made this film, and that is probably its main redeeming feature.  Les Garçons et Guillaume, à table may struggle to get you to reflect on the serious gender issues at its heart but it has no difficulty making you laugh.

Film Synopsis

Guillaume had a far from conventional childhood.  When he was four or five, his mother would call him into dinner by shouting: "Boys and Guillaume, dinner's ready!"   Guillaume knew there and then that he was different from other boys, but he could never tell how he was different.  As he grew up, he delighted in imitating his mother.  Maybe he should have been born a girl?  A teenager, he finds himself attracted to boys, but for some reason the boys he falls for have no interest in him.  It will take Guillaume a long time to discover who he really is, and along the way there will be innumerable mishaps and misunderstandings...