The Hairdresser’s Husband (1990, Patrice Leconte)

33/100

Second viewing, last seen during its 1992 U.S. theatrical release. Having loved Leconte’s previous film, Monsieur Hire, I was stoked for his follow-up; at year’s end, however, it made my list of ’92’s biggest disappointments, alongside the likes of Death Becomes Her and Toys. (Was a bigger fan of Zemeckis and Levinson back then than I am today.) And now I see very clearly what my objection was: There’s no movie here.

Others disagree, obviously—The Hairdresser’s Husband appears in The Great Movies IV (I will tactfully pretend not to note the adolescent quality Ebert shared with this film’s protagonist, as well as with Fellini and Russ Meyer, oh all right THEY LIKE BIG BOOBS AND THEY CANNOT LIE), received the Prix Louis Delluc (awarded in recent years to Misericordia, Saint Omer, Pacifiction, etc.), garnered generally strong reviews (or I wouldn’t have seen it), so forth. Even after reading a bunch of praise, though, the appeal escapes me. This film is not funny, unless you’re amused by the occasional spectacle of sexagenarian Jean Rochefort dancing goofily to Middle Eastern music. (The trailer sold that hard, as I recall.) It is not sad, except perhaps at the very end…but there’s been no gradual build to that action, which arrives out of nowhere and isn’t lingered upon. It is romantic only if, unlike me, you swoon at relationships founded on absolutely nothing—featuring, in this case, a gorgeous young woman inexplicably agreeing to marry some random, much older man who proposes during their first meeting, during which she cuts his hair in near-total silence. It is erotic only if you, unlike me, get hot and bothered by braless loose-blouse nipslips. Most crucially, it is not dramatic at all. There is zero conflict. A boy who’s horny for hairdressers resolves to marry one, miraculously does, and then spends most of the film being extremely happy that he did, because he can feel her up when the shop closes (and sometimes before). Good for him! Not great for me, however.

Ebert perceived Hairdresser’s Husband as a cautionary tale about what happens when you get your heart’s desire, and that’s a movie I might well have found bracing. Don’t agree that it describes this movie, however. For one thing, the tone throughout—even after one party, shall we cryptically say, chooses to end the eternal honeymoon, just in case it’s not eternal after all—is warm, cozy, nostalgic. (The late Eduardo Serra, whose résumé as D.P. includes everything from Unbreakable to the last two Harry Potters, lights accordingly.) Charming interludes like the one in which a customer inadvertently interrupts Antoine and Mathilde’s wedding reception, getting his beard shaved by Mathilde while she’s still in her white dress, in no way suggest delusion on anyone’s part. Neither do scenes of exceedingly mild erotomania, really. It’s a fundamentally blissful film, given ostensible weight by one character’s unlikely decision to ensure that it’ll never become anything other than blissful. Leconte goes to town with the sensuality of having one’s hair gently shampooed and such, which isn’t nothing…but the rest comes perilously close to being nothing. Even its view of sex is fundamentally pubescent. I can now see that Monsieur Hire similarly romanticizes arrested development (and my regard for it has accordingly dropped a bit), but at least that one has some emotional oomph.