The Hairdresser's Husband
A film by Patrice Leconte
Produced by Thierry De Ganay
Starring Jean Rochefort and Anna Galiena
Music by Michael Nyman
Reviewed by Mario Giorgetti
This film is for those of us who take any kind of sensual pleasure in having our hair shampooed, stroked and clipped and our scalps and egos lovingly massaged. Those who have ever dreamt of being seduced by their favourite hairdresser will enjoy The Hairdresser's Husband even more. They can look forward to 80 minutes of fantasy, sexual games and an unforgettable menage a deux.
Eroticism was also a motif in Monsieur Hire, Leconte's last film, which dealt with sexual obsession of a different kind. The Hairdresser's Husband is a lighter, sensual fantasy that almost succeeds in suspending disbelief.
Patrice Leconte likes to have artistic control, and he impresses his highly individual way of seeing on all his films. Inspired by Tavernier's style, he has been won over by the cinemascope frame as an ideal format for tightly controlled spatial arrangements and intimate subject matter.
Again in this latest film, Leconte is writer, director and camera operator. For the sound track, he has chosen Michael Nyman, with whom he has a good working relationship and who regularly composes for Peter Greenaway. Here Nyman creates just the right ambience and gives a genuine Arabic feel to the dance scenes.
Although the story is not autobiographical, the central theme finds common ground in Leconte's early experiences. Young Antoine (Henry Hocking) is a sensitive boy who develops a taste for dizzy Arab music and the heady perfumes of the hairdresser's salon. Asked by his father what he intends to do when he grows up, Antoine replies promptly: "Marry a hairdresser".
With steady resolve, he returns again and again to the local salon to have his hair trimmed shorter and shorter by a voluptuous redhead. Her carelessly buttoned smock reveals her glorious bosom. And for impressionable Antoine, there is no higher happiness than to possess it completely.
We catch up with Antoine (Jean Rochefort) when, well into middle age, he finally fulfils his dream and marries Mathilde (Anna Galiena), a local hairdresser. Mathilde is preoccupied by ageing and the death of desire. But she shares Antoine's penchant for imaginative erotica and an insular life spent almost totally indoors. Love is all they have and all they need.
Daydreams do not translate well into reality. And in their shared sexual fantasies, Antoine and Mathilde glorify physical desire at the expense of the usual concomitants of love and marriage, such as children, friends and family. They are trapped mind and body in the exclusive domain of the purely erotic.
Nevertheless, they understand each other's needs and carry on their love-making rituals in a cocoon insulated from the world outside. free from his childhood fixation, and the woman he marries remains a fetish and an adolescent fantasy. Mathilde has no past and is afraid of the future. Is she real, or just an incredibly lifelike figment of Antoine's febrile imagination?
This question must occur to the salon's passing clientele, who are the couple's only worthwhile human contact. But they too understand the game, and they are not about to break the spell. They themselves are refugees from an intolerable life outside. Out there this kind of love cannot exist; out there lurk shattered dreams, blinding reality, and death.
The most genuinely dramatic moment of the film is also its most poignant, when the wavering tension of an untenable premise is released like a whip crack. But no sooner do we think we're safely back in some semblance of reality than the story plunges us into denouement and back into a surrealism of the most cruel kind. It takes us, dramatically, within a hair's breadth of insanity.
Although Jean Rochefort as leading man fits a little uncomfortably in the role of romantic hero, he nevertheless makes a valiant effort and succeeds in surprising ways. Anna Galiena, in an undemanding role as Antoine's ideal woman, underplays the character beautifully and her meaningful looks are as eloquent as her silences.
Unmistakably French, with a pate de foie kind of sexiness that is served up plain and explicit, this film takes us into an unsettling madness. Seductive as the combined fragrances of Cairo's Perfume Palace, The Hairdresser's Husband is an intoxicating experience.