Hairy Situation

In La Moustache, a strip of missing facial hair sprouts a thick existential dilemma.
by Jay Antani
Rating: 2.5 out of 5

In adapting his novel of facial hair horror, writer-director Emmanuel Carrère takes his cinematic cues in equal parts from Antonioni and Hitchcock. After shaving off his moustache on a lark, soft-spoken, good-natured Marc (Vincent Lindon) finds his life slowly beginning to unravel. His wife, Agnès (Emmanuelle Devos) doesn’t even notice the absent hairs on Marc’s face. She claims he’s never had a moustache, and blows her top on his mere insistence that he did. It’s not just Agnès either. Marc’s friends and co-workers all express puzzlement over Marc’s claim of moustache-shaving. Marc scavenges up his discarded moustache hairs, and produces old photos clearly showing a strip of fur under his nose. But it’s all for naught, and before long, Agnès begins to wonder what Marc would look like in a straitjacket. Marc is thrown into a full-blown funk, causing him to squat in his shower stall and stare blankly at the water swirling down the drain like trickles of his own life. Either he’s going crazy, or his wife—in complicity with everyone they both know—is conspiring to make Marc think he is. It feels like the domestic ennui of La Notte run through the paces of a Twilight Zone scenario.

To his credit, Carrère keeps a comic-absurdist tone to all this stuff. He knows that the sight of two adults screaming at each other over a missing moustache is not exactly firm ground for serious psychodrama. Still, as Marc finds evidence of his life—along with that of his father and closest friends—literally disappearing, we feel the storm clouds of Kafkaesque paranoia gather over him. La Moustache momentarily resembles a Hitchcockian thriller, tracking an innocent’s unwitting attempt to flee from dangers he doesn’t fully comprehend. Carrère shunts us from Paris to Hong Kong as Marc tries to escape his existential nightmare, to regain his composure and his sanity, it would seem. No such luck, though, because the only way through this rabbit hole is straight down. The scenery may have changed, but Marc’s horrors have not.

Carrère wants to chart one man’s descent into hell, a vortex of quantum nightmares. But of whose making? Marc’s, or those nearest to him? Toward what thematic gain is Carrère leading us, if any? In terms of logic and meaning—things that even the artiest of movies need to support their framework of symbols and metaphors—La Moustache is an awfully rickety, hollow exercise in style over substance. We do thankfully get solid performances by Lindon and Devos to distract us. Devos craftily keeps us guessing whether Agnes’ displays of shock and distress over Marc’s breakdown are feigned or the real thing. And, as Marc, Lindon keeps a light, understated touch. Unlike Hollywood heroes, this guy isn’t the take-charge type, ready to go head-to-head with his nemesis, real or imagined. Rather, he’s vulnerable, lonely, terrified—a regular guy. Our sympathies go out to Marc, and we wish we could help. If we only knew what his problem was. LAA

Unrated. Opens Friday, July 7 at select theaters.