over the moon
by Douglas Messerli
Jacques Demy (screenwriter and director) L’Événement
le plus important depuis que l’homme a marché sur la Lune (A Slightly Pregnant
Man) / 1973
As much as I love Demy’s whimsical views of the world, always garnished
with his gay sensibility, this one is dead in its tracks from the very
beginning, as driving school instructor Marco Mazetti (Mastrioianni) begins to
suffer bouts of nausea, a desire for strawberries, and a growing belly. A trip
to the doctors, the chain-smoking and increasingly incoherent Micheline Presle,
sends him to a specialist who confirms that Mazetti is, indeed, the first male
to become pregnant.
A pregnant man was once a fairly common gay fantasy. A similar “joke” was made in Rock Hudson’s film of 1959, Pillow Talk; but there it was only a passing conceit, dreamed up by the writers perhaps just to tease those in the know about Hudson’s sexuality. Hudson simply ducks into a gynecologist’s office to hide out from Doris Day, which intrigues both nurse and doctor. But here, Demy, a gay man (married to fellow director, Agnès Varda) takes it all the way, as the doctor determines his character’s pregnancy is the result of eating too much hormone-fed chicken, and Mastrioianni shares the information with his wife and friends—who greet the fact with surprising equanimity (perhaps having read only the English language title of the film in which they were cast instead of the much more astounded French title, which translates as “The Most Important Event Since Man Walked on the Moon”)—soon after serving as a national spokesman for a clothes designer determined to create a maternity wardrobe for men.
Several men even appear envious of his experience, and soon males from
all over the world are reporting similar conditions.* One artist, a friend of a
woman acquaintance, admits he has always wanted to have a baby. And the women
joke that from now on they will all be better understood by their companions.
Like Demy’s previous films, all of this fantasy is drolly handed out
with bright colors and an occasional song (in the title song, Legrand, in
English translation asks, “Who doesn’t feel nervous in a world like ours?” And,
in fact, all of the characters in this movie might feel more than nervous about
their obsessions.
But as several critics have pointed out,
since there is no tension between any of the characters, the “specialness” of
the event is drained from the narrative, and we are allowed little delight in
what otherwise might make for a series of charged statements either in defense
or opposition to male birthing. If nothing else, such an event might have
shifted the whole notion of the role women play in the world and also rid us of
the notions of the necessity of only male-female marriages for the survival of
the species.
Both Mastrioianni and Deneuve are so easygoing that they appear as if
they are reciting their lines instead of living through a kind of miracle. The
only “thrill of it all” is that with the advertising money they can now afford
to rent a larger hair-dressing shop and maybe even join businesses, with a
small corner of the space devoted to Mazetti’s driving school. And, yes, now
the couple, living together for years with a son from a previous marriage, will
at last get married.
In the days of second-wave of French feminism and early gay liberation,
and long before gays could marry and adopt children, one can imagine that Demy
dreamt up this fable in order to talk about his own desires for a male-centered
domestic life. His and Varda’s son, Mathieu, was born the year before Jacques
made this movie.
Yet, predictably, the movie can only disappoint, as Mazetti is finally
told that his pregnancy has been only a hysterical one. And we wake up to the
fact that as far as we know, no man, not even on the moon, can have a baby by
himself.
*Billy
Crystal underwent a similar trauma in the movie Rabbit Test.
Los
Angeles, November 10, 2016
Reprinted
from World Cinema Review (November 2016).
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