Jude Dry | Monsieur Le Butch / 2022

the mushroom cut

by Douglas Messerli

 

Jude Dry (screenwriter and director) Monsieur Le Butch / 2022 [12 minutes]

 

Monsieur Le Butch begins with a young woman (filmmaker Jude Dry) cutting her own hair into a rather lesbian-butch like “do,” before she offers an outdoors haircut to her mother, Cecelia. Cecelia appreciates having her own personal hairstylist and wonders what her “daughter” might with wish to call her new outdoor hairdressing salon, an idea to which Jude appears rather cold.  “She”* later replies rather negatively to the entire idea—“he” is after all a filmmaker, and Jude, moreover, does not identify with the female pronoun. As Jude later makes clear, “she” does not identity as a “girl” or a “woman.”

     Jude has evidently returned home to be with her feisty mother in Vermont during the COVID quarantine, the two of them left alone to work out their differences regarding Jude’s gender, all of which Jude hopes to capture on film. Jude’s suggestion for a salon name is the unimaginative “Jude’s Vermont Salon.” No, that won’t at all do, suggests the mother.

     In fact, Cecelia, appears to be anything but an out-of-touch or dismissive mother. She’s been reading about the sexual “Other,” and wonders if Jude does not identify sexually as an “other,” how does “she” define herself? That’s the difficulty, answers Jude, I don’t know how to define me

yet. “That’s the point of the movie.” Her mother begs, at least, for an old “lady pass” or perhaps even a “mother pass” on the whole pronoun “thing.”

     Jude isn’t amused. “Let’s not talk about the pronoun thing; it will just upset me.”

     Cecelia quite brilliantly responds: “Isn’t that what we’re doing here? Upsetting each other?”

     The, however, mother even writes her own monologue to explain her difficulties with the changes in her former daughter, particularly when Jude suggests that since “I am home with someone to care for me,” perhaps this is as good time as ever to have “top surgery,” an idea which the mother begs Jude to postpone at least until after her own death.

     Yet it’s clear that this wonderful woman is not about to soon disappear. At one moment when the two are not quite seeing eye-to-eye, Jude complains that Cecelia is not truly facing the difficulties her offspring is posing, and argues, incidentally, that the monologue is far too long.

      But everyone dealing with gender changes should have such an open-minded friend as this mother reveals herself to be. The film takes us a short visit to Jude’s favorite swimming hole, where he swims topless, and shows him about the house in various discussions with the mater. But it keeps returning us to the wonderful moments of this woman’s former daughter clipping her own mother’s hair. At one point the elderly woman finally decides what her offspring might call the mythical outdoor haircutting salon: “Monsieur Le Butch.” But even here Jude seems recalcitrant, suggesting “he” or “they” don’t speak French. But we can see the title, nonetheless, intrigues.

      Finally, the mother recounts a wonderful story of taking her then young daughter to get a haircut. The barber handed her a large book of both girl’s and boy’s haircuts from which to choose the style. As Jude leafed quickly through the front of the book, devoted to female cuts, “she” finally became entranced with what “she” saw upon reaching the boy’s pages. And finally the child’s eyes grew wide pointing with her chubby finger at one particular style, a “mushroom” cut, the mother realizing “that kid knows exactly what they want and who they are. And you’ve never lost that quality. It’s something I admire so much about you.”

      “And did you let me get the boy’s haircut?” Jude enquires.

      Well, “you know, there’s no letting you do anything; if you want something there’s no stopping you. But yes it was a mushroom cut, and Monsieur Le Butch you were right then. It suited you perfectly. You looked adorable.” She pauses, changing the word, to “handsome.” Jude kisses Cecelia on the cheek, having finally recognized that the mother has not only perceived early on the differences of her offspring, but that she has already slipped her “daughter” into a new pronoun in the use of the general “they” and “them,” and applying the world “handsome” instead of the more feminine appellation of “adorable.”

       Yes, “Monsieur Le Butch,” Cecelia proclaims, “He’s stylish. He’s cool.”

 

*I have purposely used shifting pronouns throughout this short piece to demonstrate the problems in self-identification Jude and her mother are facing in their encounters.

 

Los Angeles, August 14, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2025).