Jean Durand | Le Rembrandt de la rue Lepic (The Rembrandt in Rue Lepic) / 1911

the drag queen acquires a rembrandt

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jean Durand (screenwriter and director) Le Rembrandt de la rue Lepic (The Rembrandt in Rue Lepic) / 1911

 

Superficially another chase short from the French studio of Gaumont, Jean Durand’s The Rembrandt in Rue Lepic, perhaps intentionally but more likely with the associations culture has heaped upon issues over time, is a far deeper investigation to reality and simulacrum, and into the many issues surrounding the questions of reality and art.

      A naïve tourist couple (Clément Mégé and Berthe Dagmar) dining in a French brasserie, are sold a painting by a street artist, a real Rembrandt so the seller insists, for the price of 35 francs. So coarse are these wealthy consumers than the male buyer sits the Rembrandt, face up, on a nearby chair while he consumes his dinner.

      An Englishwoman, inexplicably a man dressed in drag, enters the brasserie, orders up an absinthe, and without the diners noticing, sits down on the chair where the buyer has placed his Rembrandt, the painting being so freshly made, that its image sticks to her skirt. The waiters refuse to serve her, perhaps because they notice she is in drag, and a fight between the women and the servers follows, the buyer realizing that his “new” painting has been inadvertently “stolen” by her dress. She clearly has no idea what has happened.

 

     Mad chaos ensues for the next 5 minutes as the woman, the others on the chase, speeds through a lobby of a hotel, knocking over everyone and others, even those just entering. A moment later she races into a room where a group of a different kind of painters are working on a wall, destroying their artful work as well.

      She next enters, through the wall, what seems to be a private dining room, followed by all the angered others, crawling out through a small window to leap through a nearby roof, crashing through the ceiling to join a man in bed, the now dozens of others soon falling into the room after the miscreant and now sexual pervert.

      She next climbs a wall to reach a small balcony and enters a Paris townhouse through its open doors, the increasing posse—suggesting that nearly all of Paris has joined in on the chase—behind her, the men and women helping each other onto the balcony before following her. Inside, where another artistic occasion is taking place, a salon vocal concert, further destruction ensues, with chairs, tables, bookcases, and all else being torn asunder.

       We see the villain back on the balcony pondering what move to make next. She leaps, the dozens of other leaping lemmings following her lead.

        They land at a grocers, destroying that place as well, but finally catch the Rembrandt robber and haul her into a serious arts gallery where, after cutting away the patch on her dress, the gallerist declares the painting—prepare yourself!— to be a forgery! “It is not an original!”

        As a commentator on the Letterboxd site, whose moniker is “Cineanalyst,” nicely summarizes: “So, we have copies of copies and a conflation of drag, if not gender overall, with art forgery.” Even the film, in its constant destruction of set after set, deconstructs itself, revealing the walls, ceilings, furniture, and other objects to be only imitations, a pretend world of light flickering in the dark.

        Yet the most fascinating question of the film remains a total mystery. Why would an English drag queen walk into a Paris brasserie in the middle of the day to order an absinthe? It’s clear that she wanted the attention, but was not expecting the kind of following she immediately amassed—nor the citizens’ determination to so thoroughly question her sexual authenticity. No wonder the British have always thought of the French as being absolutely mad.

 

Los Angeles, June 21, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (July 2023).