Marie-Claude Treilhou | Simone Barbès ou la vertu (Simone Barbès, or Virtue) / 1980

successfully navigating a crazy world

by Douglas Messerli

 

Michel Delahaye and Marie-Claude Treilhou (screenplay), Marie-Claude Treilhou (director) Simone Barbès ou la vertu (Simone Barbès, or Virtue) / 1980

 

This truly memorable lesbian drama begins in a heterosexual male porno house in Montparnasse where Simone (Ingrid Bourgoin), dressed in a half-sleaved black blouse and blank leather pants and Martine (Martine Simonet), wearing a loosely fitting yellow dress, work in the lobby as ushers making sure their male customers have tickets and find the appropriate theaters, no mean tasks, since these lonely and horny, mostly middle-aged men like to wonder the halls and try out several porno films for the price of one. Some are regulars, expecting special treatment, others are just occasional porn goers, but all are obviously without women in their lives or, even more likely, cheating on their dissatisfied spouses who wait at home.

     In fact, one of those unhappy spouses might describe Martine, who has been late to work in attempting to settle a dispute with her long-time boyfriend who, while she is off at work, is clearly cheating on her.

    Simone is angry, not just for the fact that Martine is often late, leaving her to do the dirty work, but because her friend is not intelligent enough to step out of her abusive relationship, despite the knowledge she must certainly have regarding the inconsequentiality of the male sex giving her nightly encounters.

    Martine is clearly a lost romantic, always ready to excuse these lonely, lost men who smell up the place with their bodies and cum, so that Simone is forced every so often to spray down the movie halls with a freshener.

    Fortunately, director Marie-Claude Treilhou, out host into a world of failed men, never allows us to enter any of the porno halls. We merely hear the moans and groans of the porn screen maidens who are constantly being told by male voices that they should like it and take it harder.

    The men who do stop by and talk to our ushers are all somewhat deranged, one named the Marquis who pretends to be an aesthete of the porn film genre, commenting on the female porn stars as if they were consummate actors whose performances are worthy of his judgment. Another man hides outside of the obviously more expensive theater, waiting his turn to sneak in. Yet another complains that the movie he’s been watching has queer scenes and that the men in the theater are jacking of together.

     A new visitor (Noël Simsolo) claims to be one of the porn directors, demanding to get in free—the women demand a ticket—and after having seen the film complains that its ratio is all wrong and that the theater is showing a bad print, outrageous, he screams, arguing that even the Belgians do it better than the French.

    In short, even the men we do meet in this world, are foolish at best, and more likely utterly insane. It is the women who direct our focus as they share baguettes of pâté and drinks of cheery liquor which Simone brings from a foray to from a nearby bar. But even that short adventure into the outside world results in her bringing back with her absurd tales of a mad legionnaire and a woman pretending she were an actress from the nearby Comédie-Française—an institution that becomes almost a subtext in this work, with the supposedly uneducated Simone often quoting Moliere—who has evidently confused her melodramatic theater acting with events in real life, playing out later, even on the streets, an estranged wife to the imaginary legionnaire husband who can’t comprehend a world of what she’s talking about.

     Some of the commentators and film reviewers found this first section of the film’s tri-partite structure slow going, but I found it absolutely enchanting, focusing as it does on a real relationship between the two female coworkers who, despite their vast differences, have bonded through their job to become legitimate friends who, unlike nearly everyone else in this film, can openly share their love and criticism for and of one another.

   In this usually male dominated world, strangely enough it is out two women—sitting under the strange visual image of two yellow neon eyes, the idea of cinematographer Jean-Yves Escoffier, trying to find a set where everything had to be kept to a minimum since the small-budgeted movie was using the space on the down-hours of the real porno theater—who provide us with any sense of meaning or order. The men who come here have no real sexual lives and cannot even communicate in what might be described as a reasonable dialogue. But the women bring life to this otherwise desolate spot, breathing out a sense of air, particularly the implacable Simone, that is fresher than any spray she might employ to get rid of the lingering stink of the male clients.

     Magically at midnight everything shifts as Simone moves away, climbing a mysterious red staircase into another world of a lesbian bar which she visits not so much out of interest as to bring home her lover, who works there is a somewhat similar role, dressed up as a waiter, but who in reality is an escort whose job it is to flirt with other female customers with the goal of encouraging to order up drinks, sometimes even magnums of champagne.

    Standing close to the bar and the seemingly normal male bartender—although at one point even he attempts to cast a magic spell over the place to ward out the evil in he feels in the air on this night. Surrounding her throughout the bar is a kind of enchanted chaos, as crazy as the small bar she previously visited, but just slightly more explicable and contained.

     Elisabeth Lebovici, who was there for the original shoot, quickly summarizes events:

 

“Simone goes there to wait for her girlfriend, who, it is suggested, is an escort. As Simone hangs around, Jackie, one of the sub-hostesses, tries to flog her a cooker; the women’s band plays; a punk singer gets worked up in a series of dodgy rhymes as patrons look on indifferently; women dance and flirt; a man is killed; and Simone gets bored waiting. Asked to look after a pampered couple by Jackie, Simone’s girlfriend keeps asking her to postpone her departure before telling her to call later.”

 

     But that doesn’t at all get to the heart of this very special bar in a day when lesbians and a few men of all ages, different perspectives, and various inclinations had little choice to gather in a sort of melting pot of gay female sexuality. In those days clearly there no niche bars for dykes who like femmes, or proper granny lesbian waltzers, or where wealthy women who preferred their own company to the men to whom they were wed to escape: they all climbed the same red magic staircase and spoke the magic words for entry.

    The major performers consist of a small contingent of older women who might have been at home in the lesbian bars of Berlin in the early 1930s, playing on everything from a muted drum, a keyboard transformer, and congo drums Brechtian-like songs that mostly attract the leftover lesbian working girls and previous librarians who dance slow waltzes while around them trot other modernized women in red vinyl dresses and contemporary pants and blouse pairings. On the edges sit the grand dames of another era, sometimes surrounded by one or two gay boys, either their admirers or husbands. A truly wealthy woman with her obviously obliging hubby grandly enters for her monthly or quarterly visit to the spot; she is given a special spot from which others have been asked to vacate.

     Meanwhile, the punk artist screams out her naughty lyrics, “If I’m butch it’s to protect my beef, if I’m butch it’s to defend my snatch.”

     The two woman gladiators in more revealing garb, one of them apparently Simone’s girlfriend, play out a carefully choreographed battle with swords.

      Actually, in its crazy diversity and busy goings-on, it seems to be the kind of bar I would love to spend some time in. But men are simply playthings here and likely to get killed if they take any serious action; after the murder, the wealthy grande dame and her husband are carefully escorted out before the police are called.

      Surely Simone would have loved to have shot down the male guest who tells her that she doesn’t smile enough. But then, the one thing we have come to realize by this time in the film is that Simone is a strong survivor, with no need of protection or even aggressive actions; she is in control of herself and the situation at all times, a woman who might almost remind us of a far less put upon Jeanne Dielman of Chantal Ackerman’s film of just five years earlier. No need to put any sharp weapon into a sleazy man’s neck.

     Recognized by almost all the regulars as a force, Simone attracts them to her for various reasons without having to even abandon her post by the bar which she maintains until she is so bored and simply disinterested in the goings-on that she decides to take off, leaving her girlfriend to promise to contact her the next day.

    But now, long after hours, she must endure the walk home. And even then, on the empty streets, she is not entirely free of men who might attempt to pick up a late night female stroller. One such individual (Cahiers du cinéma critic and co-screenwriter Michel Delahaye) keeps trying to block her path with his car.

    Peering in to see a well-dressed man in a moustache, Simone agrees to get in for a drive home—but only if she can drive. As he attempts to invite her up to a friend’s apartment for a drink, she assures him that she’ll find an open bar where she’ll treat him; but of course at this late hour there is no such open bar.

    As she engages him in conversation, it comes more and more apparent even to him that she is not only controlling the situation but that she has no intentions of granting any sexual advances or even a kiss. Gradually, his own masks are revealed as he admits that he is a Swiss croupier and finally, in tears, that even his moustache is not real.

    Simone reaches her destination the very moment, evidently quite by accident in the shoot so Lebovici tells us, when the streets light click off, leaving the poor empty-handed and -headed male to drive home alone. Yet surely Simone has left him with a gift of truly heartfelt conversation deeper than any other that he might have found.

     By the end of the night even—or perhaps I should say particularly—any gay feminist like myself will have fallen in love with Simone, with utterly no intentions of taking her to bed, confessing any heartfelt secrets, or even attempting to get to know her better. If I wore a hat, as many still do in the movies, I’d simply tip it to her and nod “hoorah!” She is truly a virtuous woman who has found a way in the crazy society in which she lives to remain true to herself. Her girlfriend will surely come around and they’ll have hot sex. And then, well the ball remains in Simone’s court. I hope she finds what she wants.

 

Los Angeles, November 29, 2025

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (November 2025).