Shaved and Confused

I’ve never been able to grow a mustache, and I’ve always been vaguely resentful of guys who can. Actually, I can barely grow eyebrows—like my father, I’ve got alopecia, which means I have random bald spots all over my body. The condition first manifested itself when I was about 15 as a matching pair of small, hairless ovals on my thighs; not long after, I developed a strange patch of missing hair at the base of my skull, which was followed by a bald spot about the size of a silver dollar on the right side of my head. Self-consciously, I began growing my hair long to cover it up, but when it occurred to me that my hairdo was really nothing more than a displaced combover, I decided, like my father, just to shave it all off.

People noticed the difference immediately. The same, sadly, can’t be said for Marc Thiriez, the hero of La Moustache, an odd, unclassifiable little French movie from director Emmanuel Carrère, who also wrote the source novel.

As played by Vincent Lindon (perhaps best known to North American DVD renters as the male lead in Claire Denis’ sublime Friday Night), he’s a middle-aged but still handsome Parisian architect whose loving wife Agnès is played by Emmanuelle Devos (who those same francophile DVD renters will vividly recall from Arnaud Desplechin’s amazing recent film Kings and Queen). The film begins with Marc staring at his reflection in the mirror as he sits in the bathtub, shaving—can this damp, repulsive-looking practice really be as widespread as French movies would have me believe?—wondering whether he should shave off his mustache. “I’ve never seen you without it,” Agnès replies before leaving their apartment on an errand.

That settles it: off it goes, in an impressively detailed shaving sequence, the best and most realistic of its kind since Luke Wilson shaved off his beard and mustache in The Royal Tenenbaums. Really: hats off to Carrère for showing every stage of this complicated process. Film directors always underestimate men’s curiosity about other men’s grooming habits, and the movie theatre is a great place to pick up all sorts of little tips and tricks, like the shaving advice Jon Polito’s Italian gangster gives to his chauffeur near the end of Miller’s Crossing or the scene in Charade where Cary Grant explains to Audrey Hepburn how he shaves the cleft in his chin.

Anyway, here’s where things in La Moustache start to get weird. Marc’s decision to shave his mustache seems to have opened up a hole in the very fabric of reality. When his wife returns, she doesn’t notice anything different about him. Neither do the friends at the dinner party they attend that night. Doesn’t anyone notice I’ve shaved off my mustache?, asks an increasingly exasperated Marc when he and Agnès return home. What are you talking about?, she replies. You’ve never had a mustache.

Carrère directs the film in such a deadpan French way that it’s hard to know how we’re supposed to react to its premise. Marc’s distress is so genuine that we can’t really take the film as a comedy, but the film never quite ratchets up enough suspense for it to qualify as a psychological horror movie. Every review I’ve read of this film compares it to a different predecessor: The New York Times likens it to John Cheever’s short story “The Swimmer,” Slant compares it to Claire Denis’ L’Intrus, it reminded The San Francisco Chronicle of Gaslight, while The Onion thought it had more in common with Roman Polanski or Michaelangelo Antonioni. Myself, I thought an apt comparison would be to Krzysztof Kieslowski’s The Double Life of Véronique, another enigmatic fable fascinated by the notion of alternate realities and the malleability of identity.

La Moustache takes a fascinating turn in its final half-hour, as Marc goes on the run from his wife, who wants to commit him to a mental institution, and ends up in Hong Kong, compulsively riding the ferry back and forth to Kowloon over and over again. The Onion says here’s where La Moustache becomes “another dry art film about a guy walking around,” but I like those kinds of movies—and this one comes up with a surprisingly satisfying resolution that’s nevertheless perfectly in keeping with the oblique tone of everything that’s preceded it. There’s even another good scene of Marc shaving in the bathroom of his Hong Kong hotel suite.

I need to shave today too, come to think of it. Actually, I’ve been noticing that after 20 years or so, the bald spot on the side of my skull seems to be growing in, which suggests that maybe I can stop shaving my head. I wonder if anyone will notice if I do.