Bertrand Blier | Tenue de soirée (Ménage) / 1986

metamorphoses

by Douglas Messerli

 

Bertrand Blier (screenwriter and director) Tenue de soirée (Ménage) / 1986

 

Bertrand Blier’s 1986 absurdist comedy is a satire. But what it is a satire of is still open to question. Since its unhappily married heterosexual couple, Antoine (Michel Blanc) and Monique (Miou-Miou), begin the film by loudly arguing at a public dance only to be picked up by a bisexual burglar, Bob (Gérard Depardieu) who quickly convinces them to give up their poverty-stricken romance to join him on a couple of heists and to jump in bed with him, perhaps Blier is satirizing the fragility of heterosexual marriage, this film being shot before queers who allowed the share the same state-and-church sanctioned “privilege.”

 

    Of course, in Antoine’s case the invitation to participate in male/male sex isn’t immediately accepted, and part of the fun of the early half of this film is watching to see how Bob slowly manipulates the nerdy looking Antoine into offering up his bottom to what Monique insists is Bob’s more-than-ample sized erection. Yet through offering them up regular stacks of cash beyond their imagination, a lot of compliments about Antoine’s quite ordinary appearance, Monique’s demand that her husband just play along, and Bob’s insistence that he has fallen madly in love with him, Antoine finally becomes curious and eventually breaks down, actually enjoying being fucked in the butt—only to be sold for a great deal of money to an elderly gentleman who is later described as Bob’s “protection.”

     Antoine, as you might expect, is outraged, but Bob reassures him by reminding him that is after all, a thief is not be trusted.

      With all this attention to her husband, it is only logical that Monique might be a bit jealous, despite all of the good times they have together breaking into mansions to which, in one case, a terribly bored couple return home in the midst of their robbery and attempt to the engage them, by gunpoint, in a mixed-gender orgy. 

      Or perhaps this is a satire about what homophobic heterosexuals believe is always at the back of all homosexual’s minds, the desire to convert every “normal” heterosexual male into being a fag. Having served time in prison, Bob seems to be a perfect example of a straight guy who, after learning the ropes, is dedicated to spreading the joys of anal sex to any man he meets.

    Maybe Blier simply wants to show how gay men are as chauvinistic and misogynistic as any heterosexual bro, as Bob and Antoine give up their thieving to live in a nice little cottage together with Monique who they treat like a slave, chastising her for her inability to get food on their plates on time for their arrival home from the bar, for failing to properly dust, and numerous other housewifery chores at which she has apparently failed, chiding her even for eating the chocolates they bring her as presents. Bob beats her (as he does several times in the movie) and finally pays a friend, Pedro (Michel Creton) to lure her away to his imaginary Spanish getaway where he enslaves her into prostitution.

  

    Antoine, meanwhile, attempts to take over the cooking and cleaning jobs, but  fails just as badly, Bob treating him not much better than Monique, although he does offer sex as a seeming reward for of Bob’s toiling. But when Bob, finally fed up, complains, Bob brings home several packages of what he describes as “gifts,” all containing women’s apparel and cosmetics, now requesting that Antoine obviously move on to a new identity of a transgender man.

      Perhaps this film is satirizing the very idea that transgender behavior can become an acquired taste based on someone’s else’s desires. If Antoine once more balks, he soon comes round, good sport that he has become regarding all of Bob’s requests for endless transformations.

      Dressed up quite successfully in drag, he attends a large dance with Bob that at first seems filled with young straight people, a highly unlikely place to take his new transgender girlfriend it seems. But suddenly in the middle of the event, as Bob announces he has to pee, everything appears to shift as Antoine spots his ex-wife dancing with another man, and one of the cute heterosexual dancers (Jean-Yves Berteloot) leaves his date behind to service Bob as a paid male prostitute who frequents the pissoir.

      Antoine meanwhile stalks Monique and her “beau,” which also leads to the bathroom where Antoine overhears who he now recognizes as her pimp berating her for failing to please one of her paid johns, who as Antoine attempts to intervene shoots him/her in the shoulder. Antoine responds by  grabbing the gun and killing him, before stumbling back upstairs to the dance floor only to realize what Bob has been up to.

      Having stolen the pimp’s gun, he now threatens Bob, demanding that he take him to the beach, where he may or may not decide to kill him. Finally stopping the car, Bob and Antoine battle it out, but seemingly with no resolution; but then we can’t at this point we can’t even imagine what either of them might be seeking.

    We might almost long for what seems, in comparison, as the pastoral and sane world of an Almodóvar soap opera such as Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown.

     The last scene shows the trio back together again, both Antoine and Bob this time in drag with Monique standing among other whores as they wait in the cold to pick up men—evidently without much success.

       Freezing, the three take a break, Bob and Monique choosing to sip on hot chocolate while Antoine orders up a beer, the three once more squabbling not very differently from how Monique and Antoine behaved in the film’s first sequence. Their squabbles cease, however, as the three join  together in a fantasy about Antoine’s son who attends a local school. They imagine him packing his backpack and entering the school, which brings tears to their eyes. It reminds me a bit of George and Martha’s imaginary son in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

      As Bob and Monique return to the street, Antoine orders up another beer, obviously glad to be free of the two of them, and perhaps hinting at a new chapter in these ridiculously radical metamorphoses of socio-sexual worlds.

      If you’re seeking a resolution, I suggest you seek it in another director’s work. For in the end Blier’s Tenue de soirée (“Evening Dress”) seems mostly to be a satire of itself.

 

Los Angeles, December 29, 2021

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (December 2021).