rag doll
by Douglas Messerli
Maud Ameline, Sophie Fillières, and Nicolas
Maury (screenplay), Nicolas Maury (director) Garçon chiffon (My Best
Part) / 2020
French actor and director Nicolas Maury’s Garçon chiffon (2020) might be translated into
English as “rag boy,” closer to the nickname that his mother in this movie
calls him, “napkin.” Yet the English language title, My Best Part, mundanely insists upon the role he plays on
stage (and off) as the central character Moritz Stiefel in Frank Wedekind’s Spring
Awakening, transferring the film away from the parental roots of his
psychological sufferings to focus instead on the role he learns to play in life
that allows him a new strategy of survival—not necessarily a mistaken
interpretation, but still a fairly clumsy one, as if he will now look back upon
the incidents the film reveals as something like the character Benjy Stone does
in Richard Benjamin’s My Favorite Year, with nostalgic regret.
Yet we have the pangs of the extreme jealousy that Maury’s remarkable
character feels, based on his deep feelings of unworthiness and a recognition
of the fragile oddities of his behavior in a world in which everyone else seems
to be adapting far better than he, that will not simply disappear with the
closing of the camera’s shutter after his gentle last musical number about the
possibilities
of
love. For both Maury and his character Jérémie Meyer are memorable outsiders,
figures who once you’ve witnessed you can’t quite erase from your memory. Maury
has a strange gracefulness in the manner of Dan Levy’s character David Rose in
the Canadian TV series Schitt’s Creek, a highly effeminate masculinity
that superficially looks to be so over the top that you might miss the bedrock
reality upon which the figure has structured his life.
Jérémie has the horrible blessing of having a seemingly
loving relationship with a hunk of male virility, Albert (Arnaud Valois), who
works as a veterinarian. Their relationship, even to the viewer of this film,
appears so immediately out of balance, that even we have to wonder how the two
have ever come together—perhaps one imagines, in part, because of the wonderful
blow jobs Jérémie later admits he loves to enact.
Unfortunately, Jérémie himself cannot believe his good luck, appearing
to do everything he can to undercut the relationship through his constant
suspicions that every moment that Albert is apart from him are being spent with
someone else who will replace his own love. Obviously such a tenuous sense of
commitment can only destroy what true bonds with which relationship might have
bound the two; and, unfortunately, in this case, Jérémie is not totally
mistaken in his suspicions as he learns late in the film that indeed Albert was
developing a more than collegial connection to his doctorial assistant
Gianfranco (Andrea Romano).
Spinning out of control through his byzantine suspicions of his lover,
however, we observe Jérémie attempting to regain control of his mania by
attending a “Jealousy Anonymous support group” that functions somewhat like
Alcoholics Anonymous—except that in the members’ long descriptions of their
behavior they create an environment of crazy doubt that might make even the
most trusting of individuals run out and buy a spy cam, which is precisely what
Jérémie does, finally cutting the last chord with Albert.
At the very same moment, moreover, a film role for which Jérémie had been assured only he could play, is cruelly
pulled away from him by his seemingly “best friend,” the director who suggests
that his decision to put someone else in the role surely hurts him more than
Jérémie, which the actor immediately disproves by jabbing a piece of glass into
his hand.
The satire against the film and theater world continues—perhaps a little
bit too long—through a scene in which the writer of the film, Sylvie (Laure
Calamy) determines to become the actor of her work as well, insisting on hiring
Jérémie as her personal acting coach. This time, Jérémie’s stunned crash to the floor is absolutely
unintentional but even more devastating to his body.
Is it any wonder that this apparently fragile being flees to the
countryside where he grew up, Limosin, where his mother, recovering from the
suicide her own philandering husband and Jérémie’s
father, runs a country-based bed-breakfast-and-dinner inn out of her house. Our
hero’s mother Bernadette (the marvelous Nathalie Baye) is such a force of
energy fed by her need for love from her “rag boy” son—who as a child,
evidently was found sleeping at odd places around the house and grounds like he
were some rag left behind—and anyone else that happens to cross her path, such
as her wonderful new-found handyman Kévin (Théo Christine), that you almost immediately sense why husband and
son might have suicidal thoughts.
Like Jérémie’s Albert, her absolute devotion seems to be too wonderful
to be believed—and is! She devours her son in hugs and kisses while evaluating
his numerous behavioral tics with the well-meaning tongue slashings of a verbal
whip. Her son’s youthful trances into a world anywhere other than the fraught
tensions between his mother and father, the bullying of his own youthful
girlishness by the taunting boys of the neighborhood, and his inabilities as
the son of a mother who can do nearly anything she puts or mind to or find
someone nearby to help her accomplish her desires, represents, as she describes
it, his “autistic-like behavior.” Jérémie is forced
to keep reminding her that momentarily tuning out the pain in childhood
fantasies does not necessarily represent autism. And he is forced to keep
reminding himself that he is still loved despite his failures to undertake any
of the tasks that the young strangers like Kévin, who come in and out of his
mother’s life with serial frequency, gracefully accomplish.
One cannot imagine another home in which the grown son might feel
perfectly comfortable to walk around the house in his jockey underpants or, at
times, even naked, particularly given that the fact that it is also filled with
other married couples, who are treated by the saintly Bernadette more like
family than paying guests.
Such a looney-like environment, along with stone-cold memorial service
in the middle of the woods for his dead father fitfully attended by Jérémie’s mother, the dead man’s second wife, and a mad mother who keeps mistaking her grandson
for own physically effusive son, along with Jérémie’s discovery of Kévin’s
late-night practice of swimming nude in the pool followed by chugging down a
six-pack of beer makes for a black-comic atmosphere that French cinema has
always been more than able to pull off.
Final episodes in which Jérémie retreats to
his father’s woodside hut, attempts suicide, and is rescued by a group of
nearby nuns who mysteriously offer him advice and potions to help cure his
jealousy, along with a late-night drunken confession by Bernadette of how she
discovered the existence of his father’s numerous sexual peccadilloes and
affairs through letters hidden away in the books of her personal library all
seem too bizarre and border-line surreal to be believed. But then, we have to
remind ourselves, My Best Part is a comic psychological study in mania,
not a realist story of a quirky family and their friends. And despite all the
oddities that this film heaps upon us in its voyage into the wilds before
returning us to the presumed “order,” his mother awards Jérémie the thing he
perhaps has always needed, someone for him to look after and love, a beautiful
pet dog.
In any case, these events send Jérémie back
to Paris where—after experiencing the near-death of his beloved pet which
forces him momentarily back into the world of Albert the veterinarian/lover
with whom he finally gets the opportunity to properly say goodbye—he performs
the role of Wedekind’s teenage suicide brilliantly, and is surprised by the
sudden appearance of Kévin who has shown up just for Jérémie’s performance
and—despite his previous insistence of not being interested in guys—is ready just
maybe for the blowjobs that the actor claims he loves to perform.
At
least that is what Jérémie must believe as he breaks into song about the love
and commitment he will show the beautiful handyman stud who has appeared, out
of the night, on his doorstep. And maybe, if we can simply put away our own
doubts, Jérémie (and the wonderful man behind his creation, Maury) does, after
all, deserve such happiness.
Perhaps we should perceive Garçon chiffon less as a whole cloth
of narrative experience than as a series of rag-like episodes that if carefully
picked up and skillfully stitched together create a spread under which one can
catch an hour and 48 minutes of comfy pleasure.
Los Angeles, October 24, 2021
Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October
2021).
