Mikael Buch | Let My People Go! / 2011

the difference between keeping it all in and sweating it out

by Douglas Messerli

 

Mikael Buch and Christophe Honoré (screenplay), Mikael Buch (director) Let My People Go! / 2011

 

Mikael Buch’s feature film of 2011, Let My People Go! Might be described as a comic cartoon that deconstructs its own stereotypical images as it proceeds. Yet it’s still a cartoon, and the seriousness it longs for is never quite achieved.

 

   That is not to say that, if you can forgive the sometimes egregious stereotypes, that the film isn’t a great deal of fun to watch. Nicolas Maury is particularly charming as a kind of reformed Woody Allen in the role of Ruben, a young gay French man who in order to escape his nearly hysterical Jewish family decides to get an MA in “Comparative Sauna Cultures,” eventually moving to Finland in order to establish a sauna chain. The presumption is that he has taken the heat of his own family’s fireworks for so long, that it’s time to simply sweat it all out and wash himself down in the clear Finnish waters.

      He now indeed lives at the edge of a Finnish lake with his incredibly handsome Nordic, blonde-haired boyfriend, Teemu (Jarkko Niemi). Since the sauna plan has not panned out—Finland already having enough saunas to satisfy its endlessly happy population—Ruben now works as a postman, joyfully delivering up the morning mail in a small Disneyfied village that looks even prettier than the TV community of Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998), and wherein the happy villagers greet him, as they did Truman, with smiles, cookies, and salutations of love.

     In this healthfully permissive world, Teemu’s mother Helka (Outi Mäenpää), who in her youth lived in a ménage à trois with two female Senegalese prostitutes, welcomes her son’s and Ruben’s wedding by capturing a wolf and setting it free in the forest. Nothing could possibly go wrong in this paradise—until one day it does through a series of very strange events which sets Rueben’s life reeling and whirls him back to his impossible family in Paris.

     On his morning route Ruben delivers up a package that the recipient, upon opening it, immediately rejects, demanding the postman hand him back the signed receipt. Inside the package is 999, 980 Euros, with which he refuses to have anything to do. Ruben rightfully refuses to take back the registered package, and the bickering soon becomes physical as the older man grabs the postman as he attempts to escape. Several times it appears the elderly gentleman Tilikainen (Kari Väänänen) is about to have a heart attack, and Ruben is forced to return just to check up on him. But each time it is only a ruse, the man attempting to force the package upon the deliverer.

      By the time Ruben finally escapes, he hears his customer drop to the ground, apparently dead; terrified of having caused his death and afraid to leave any evidence, the young postman has no choice, so it seems, but to grab up the package and escape back home where he spills out the rather unbelievable story to his school teacher husband.

      Teemu, however—as his mother declares—as grown so bourgeois, perhaps in reaction to his own liberal upbringing, demands his lover go to the police and explain the situation. But with the money in hand and a dead man in the yard, Ruben is rightfully assured that they will have no choice but to insist that he has killed him. An argument follows which ends by Teemu demanding Ruben leave his home and their relationship end.

     Without even time to think things out, Ruben grabs up three suitcases and clothes and the package of Euros and heads back, sick to his stomach, to his family just in time for the Passover celebration.

 

   We soon discover seemingly endless reasons for Ruben’s consternation. In Paris his luggage does not show up on the baggage carousel, and terrified that the authorities have discovered the money, he is forced to tell his waiting family that his luggage has been temporarily lost. That family itself, as I have already hinted, is a force to be reckoned with: his mother Rachel (played by the noted Spanish actor Carmen Maura, perhaps most famous for her anguished role in Pedro Almodóvar’s Pepa in Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown), is the controlling center of this coven who have made most of their money from the dry-cleaning business. She is only too happy to see her weak and underweight boy return home, praying that he has broken up with his hard-hearted “Swede.” Ruben’s sister, Irène (Amira Casar) immediately whispers into his ear that she is secretly about to break up with her husband, Hervé (Charlie Dupont), an out-of-work goy who Ruben’s contentious family have never forgiven for having married their Jewish daughter. Ruben’s handsome but also highly religious and slightly homophobic brother Samuel (Clément Sibony) has already told his slightly obnoxious son who wants to grow up to become a rabbi that Ruben has returned just to “stir up the shit.” And that’s just for starters.

     Over the next couple of days Ruben discovers that his father (Jean-Francois Stevenin), as he admits for the first time to any family member, has been seeing another woman for several years and now wants Ruben to meet his mistress. To escape his family, Ruben visits a local gay club, bedecked for Passover with an “Out of Egypt” theme, only to discover among the dancers the respected lawyer and respected family friend Maurice Goldberg (Jean-Luc Bideau), who is so excited to encounter “fresh meat” that he quite literally pulls Ruben home and into his bed, determining that now that Ruben has left Finland they will be become lovers.

      A great deal of the film is spent in Ruben’s attempts to escape his randy would-be elder lover, visits Ruben at home where he attempts to kiss him in from his his mother, and later is indirectly responsible for destroying the car Ruben has borrowed from his brother. Later, Goldberg further bollixes up his Finland romance as well.

      A drunken Teemu, meanwhile, falls into bed with an old classmate, now a friendly forest ranger (Olavi Uusirvita), and finally discovers that old Tilikainen is not only still alive but that he did not want to accept the money because it was secretly saved by his now dead wife having caused a greedy family free-for-all amongst his own kids.

      Teemu gets on a plane to Paris to make it up with Ruben at the very moment that Hevré throws his wife Irène out of the house, leading the macho Samuel to attempt to not only personally snip

off his foreskin but to castrate the goy. The father and both his sons end up, predictably, in jail just at the moment that Teemu shows up at the house wherein Rachel is spilling out her sorrows to Goldberg, the latter of whom tells the Finn to go back home since he and Ruben have now hooked up.

     Somehow, in the midst of these and numerous other extraneous Saturday Night Live-like skits, Ruben gets word to Teemu of his real love for him, his suitcases (money intact) are delivered to the family house, and the dueling trio of musketeers are freed. Teemu returns for a late Passover celebration, and, finally introduced to this zany family, is made to feel welcome as the only remaining evidence of true and faithful love.

     Obviously in such a busy farce, not every comic moment works, and after a while the viewer wishes, just like Ruben, for a well-deserved rest, maybe even a little nap. But who can complain ultimately about such a totally accepting movie that features the daily failures and tiny triumphs of human beings as represented by Ruben’s hot-headed and Teemu’s cool families. Perhaps the Paris folk might try out a whipping themselves in a sauna once in a while to let it all out, and Teemu might come back to Paris on occasion just to warm up in the ridiculousness of such spirited family love.

 

Los Angeles, June 12, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (June 2024).