Séverine de Streyker and Maxime Feyers | Calamity / 2017

a slap in the face of “normality”

by Douglas Messerli

 

Séverine de Streyker and Maxime Feyers (screenwriters and directors) Calamity / 2017 [22 minutes]

 

Well, at least us queer boys have stopped dragging home our boyfriends to meet out mom and dads! That was so hard on the old folks. I remember my father suddenly behaving in a manner that was completely unlike him, noting all the beautiful women he spotted along the way in our car trip from airport, my mother firmly seated in front seat not expressing a peep about his sudden misogynous statements, the kind he would have never made if the two us sitting in the backseats weren’t such terrible threat to his masculinity. I was embarrassed, not just for him but perhaps moreso for my mother; but she seemed not to notice, perhaps finding his symbolic catcalls even appropriate given the situation.

    How might they have responded to what the young son Romain (Bastien Ughetto) brings home, a lovely transgender chanteuse named Cléo (François Maquet), in the French Belgian film Calamity directed by the duo Séverine de Streyker and Maxime Feyers? Lucien (Jean-Michel Balthazar), Bastien’s father and his mother France (Ingrid Heiderscheidt) have returned home earlier than expected from a visit to his grandmother to find Bastien sleeping in the darkened living room with his girlfriend.

    Before she even gets a good look at Cléo, France is in the kitchen cooking up a great dinner for not only for Romain and Cléo but for the already invited brother Michael (Arthur Marbaix) and his pregnant girlfriend Agathe (Judith Williquet). Although Romain demurs, explaining that they have to return to the city where they are students, France refuses to hear of it. Romain attempts to explain that he wants her to meet Cléo under different circumstances, but she is already whipping up the eggs for a special cake and refuses to accept his excuses. Finally, the whole family will meet Roman’s girlfriend!

    When the couple return from their upstairs retreat, France is almost so overwhelmed by their presence that she hardly notices what the rest of her family immediately do. She scurries back into the kitchen to prepare her sauce for her fish dinner, only to have her other son Michael whisper into her ear like he were Iago spitting out gossip into Othello’s, asks her not only if she had no her son was a “homo,” that Cléo is not a girl, but not a man either.  “In fact, Romain is not a homo because Cléo is a tranny.”

    The shock leads her, for the first time in her life, to burn her sauce. She has to start all over again, as her husband Lucien whispers that they need to have a full conversation with both son and his friend.

    France is convinced, as are so very many misled mothers, that it’s all just a phase in Romain’s life, and eventually he will return to “normal,” the word she can’t get out of her head. By the time she actually serves up the dinner, the entire family, with except perhaps the pregnant Agathe who gathers up her now milk-filled boobs to ask Cléo if she were hoping to develop as large of breasts as her’s now are; Cléo gently explains that she is still early in the therapy but is seeking something far more modest.

    In the uncomfortable silence of the table, Romain announces that Cléo is in a band named Calamity, she explaining that she is the singer. Lucien imagines the act where his son is wrapping his girlfriend up in chains.

    Even a neighbor, seeming to point directly in their living room (who actually is pointing to someone off camera the whereabouts of a lost ball) results in France taking up a cooking knife as if she were about to slaughter her son’s girlfriend. The portly Lucien decides he suddenly needs to take a walk, actually going on search for some hidden Eskimo Pies in the basement freezer.

    For a few moments, as the boys clean the table, France is forced to compare the unmarried pregnant soon-to-be daughter in law—strangely it does not at all seem to bother this truly bourgeois couple that Michael and Agathe remain unmarried—to Cléo. Except for the enlarged breast and belly of Agathe there is not much difference; they behave quite similarly even making the same hand gestures.

    But France cannot allow these perceptions to enter into her horror. She soon confronts Cléo alone when she seems almost to attempt to try to seduce the boy she believes is simply way he is because he has never “had” a woman. She pulls Cléo’s hand to her breast, the woman finally slapping her future mother-in-law in the face before apologizing.

   Yet that act seems to have brought some sense of order back into the mother’s life, and in the next scene they are sitting together on the bed, facing one another’s images in the mirror. And France finally does ask a sane question: “Are you and Romain happy?” The answer is an enthusiastic “yes.”

    We now revisit Lucien who has finally found an Eskimo pie, but is ready to destroy the freezer now not a necessary thing in their lives without their children. But the shocking thing France has learned is that there is now little love between the two of them. They are now left alone with alone with one another with little but memories. Certainly her sons’ lives can be no worse than hers.

     In the last scene we see Romain and Cléo getting in the car and driving off without so much as a goodbye. Some time will need to pass before they can get together again after this disaster. But meanwhile France stands alone, perhaps the only sentient human being left in the empty suburban house.

 

Los Angeles, March 29, 2026

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (March 2026).