Stéphane Riethauser | Madame / 2019

letter to a beloved grandma

by Douglas Messerli

 

Stéphane Riethauser (screenwriter and director) Madame / 2019

 

Swiss filmmaker and gay activist Stéphane Riethauser’s Madame is a documentary-like amble through his family history focusing on his beloved grandmother, the wealthy Caroline Della Beffa who made a fortune first on her high-quality girdles, and later, through several other enterprises including a restaurant. Her larger-than-life personality, independence, and her insistence, despite two marriages, to live a life without a husband to tie her down, clearly was a major influence on her grandson. And a great deal of the film is a kind of love letter to her, devoted to explaining what he could not fully do in her lifetime, how the gifted and attractive young Stéphane gradually grew into a gay man—despite his early conservative and homophobic convictions—and eventually became one of the most noted and outspoken of gay activists, of particular important to the Swiss movement because of his training as a lawyer.

      The rest of the film is a glacially slow journey through his childhood memories and photographs as he learns that he enjoys occasionally appearing in drag and that he’s attracted to his schoolboy friends, but still can’t quite connect these “aberrations” with his own inner being. What his film reveals is how conservative Swiss society continued to be even into the late 20th century and perhaps remains today, particularly when it involves issues of family status and wealth. Although his grandmother had lived the life of true feminist, she herself did not fully connect her behavior with current events, and certainly suffered over her grandson’s early attempts communicate his shifts in thinking and behavior. Gradually, like his parents, she became a staunch supporter of his views, while still disapproving of the mores, morals, and behavior patterns of the current day, many of which she disapproved, including her grandson’s punk-like spiked hairdo. “Quasimodo,” she frowns, attempting to recut his hair (she began her career as a hairdresser).

       For Stéphane, who as a young student published attacks on celebrity lesbians such as Martina Navratilova in the local newspapers, he chalks up his own “unnormal” sexual feelings to bad-boy behavior. In fact, Reithauser creates a kind of surrogate self who might explain his outré behavior, a kind of tough who wrestles and snuggles with his friends as a ruse for his sexual desires. At one point, earlier in his life, he becomes friend with a drug-using outsider her introduces him to a pedophile who jumps upon him in a bedroom locked from the outside by his supposed friend.

      A bit like the Friedmans of the 2003 documentary film by Andrew Jarecki, Capturing the Friedmans, the Riethauser family were constantly filming and snapping photos of their activities, particularly as the tribe regularly gathered at the grandmother’s villa by the edge of Lake Geneva.

   And there were moments when I grew impatient with the painfully slow pace of his “coming out,” particularly since it happened a generation after my own slow process of self-acceptance in an age that surely was not as doe-eyed and dumb about the fact that there were active and healthy homosexuals all over the world.

       Having already seen and reviewed Riethauser’s wonderful short film about two young men who, in one afternoon, come together for a surprising sexual encounter as they break into the old, derelict Nazi holiday camp transformed later into Communist military complex, Prora (the name of his 2012 short film), I couldn’t wait to be introduced the man this confused boy would soon become.

      But then, I could see the parallels between his world and mine, brought home, in particular, because of my own Swiss heritage (both my mother’s and father’s great-grandfathers had immigrated to the US from Switzerland together to farm on nearby fields) and the fact that my own matriarchal grandmother had been the dominant force as well on my life, she similarly a feminist without perceiving herself in that role. Moreover, I also had numerous matriarchal great-great aunts who controlled their families’ lives and were strong figures who evidenced pre-feminist positions. Like the young Stéphane, I debated in the high school as a conservative. Although I never took on a persona to act out by outsider feelings, I most certainly was an outsider, totally escaping from any deep friendships until I started college, where things were simply “different” as I always believed they would be, and I could come out of the psychological shell into I had retreated.

     Unlike Stéphane Riethauser, however, I was not sent to the very best private schools, nor was I expected to fulfill a familial position in society—although like him was I expected to meet a beautiful young woman, get married, and procreate. And since my father was an educator, so too did I become one, as did my brother, and my sister more indirectly (she was employed in an executive position by the Iowa Department of Education).

      So, I understood his long dalliance with home movies, perhaps in the process himself attempting to comprehend how he had come to be so very different from what these short films outwardly attempted to portray: the perfect Swiss heterosexual family, models for their country’s exacting expectations. And, although I still feel that more objective viewers of this film will find it far too focused on his endless visits to his charmingly crusty grandma, we are rewarded with the filmmaker and gay spokesman who the boy eventually became.

      I loved his Prora, and look forward to watching his other documentaries; I hope he will continue to make further gay-oriented films.

 

Los Angeles, May 4, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (May 2023).