By Aniruddha Basu • Apr 15th, 2008 • Filed under: Film Review, Highlights, Movies, featured

Aniruddha Basu reviews Emmanuel Carrère’s 2005 film La Moustache

“Do you think I should shave off my moustache”? Middle aged (and much moustached) architect Marc Thiriez (Vincent Landon) asks his younger better half Agnes, one fine evening as the affluent couple are going out for dinner at a friend’s place. She however doesn’t think its such a good idea, but on an impulse, almost furtively, he does indeed remove all traces of facial hair.

He expects, if not a “oh my god” guffaw at least a few raised eyebrows from his near and dear ones. But nothing of that sort happens. No one even notices. Worse, Agnes and his friends and colleagues claim that he never had a moustache Naturally Marc is baffled.

At first he thinks it’s a bad joke, then he starts thinking it’s a nasty one. But soon he realizes that his friends and particularly his spouse, may be getting delusional in their denials that he ever had a moustache. Or wait, is he losing his grip on reality. Did he ever really have a moustache? To convince himself more than anyone else that he in fact did possess one, he digs out vacation photos, many years old, which clearly show him with a moustache. He shows them to Agnes, but soon the pics disappear.

It is at this point that Marc starts suspecting that his wife may be plotting to drive him crazy. In one crucial scene a sedated Marc overhears (or thinks he overhears) Agnes conspiring with a family friend to put him in the loony bin. Still drugged, he struggles out of bed, boards a taxi in the heavy Parisian rain and goes straight to the airport. Without thinking he jumps on a flight to Hong Kong.

Till here La Moustache is a Hitchcockian, finely crafted thriller, almost Vertigo-like in its shifting points of view, and quite unsettling, particularly in its suggestions that Marcs beloved may not be the loving, innocent angel that viewers have come to believe. It is also a subtle and tense portrayal of a relationship beginning to crack under its own weight. How well do two people in love really know each other? Director Emmanuel Carrere excels at building up sinister moments, without making them too obvious. Notice how he uses rain almost as a metaphor to signify some impending catastrophe.

What happens next however defies logic and interpretation. Marc reaches Hong Kong and lands up in a hotel overlooking the skyline by the bay. Distant, enigmatic memories come back to him. He writes a postcard to his wife, but keeps it with himself. He shuffles back and forth in a ferry across the harbor seemingly without reason and purpose. The dreamlike setting is accentuated by Hong Kong’s fluid ever present “sea of humanity”, in which Marc intends to lose himself. In the midst of all this, we are so captivated by these cinematic moments that we don’t even realize that the film has stopped being a thriller. Apparently Marc’s simple act of shaving off his moustache has caused the universe to bend in some incomprehensible, terrifying way, causing a shift in space and time. Or perhaps the last third of the movie is a unique cinematic representation of a consciousness (Marc’s) closing in upon itself. True the film’s ambiguous ending frustrated a number of viewers and critics alike. But looking at it another way can we really impart certainty to human motives? Or life itself?

The concluding 15 minutes reminded me of an altogether different track–the finale of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. Kubrick’s psychedelic ending had the astronaut going through wormholes in time and space only to discover life has come full circle. Likewise Marc too traverses a shift in the cosmos, and effectively ends up being a witness to his own life. Much like Marc’s angst-laden life, La Moustache may not make sense for all its running time, but it remains stubbornly enigmatic until the very end. Part-Hitchcockian, part Lynch, this mind-bending film however represents a completely original vision.

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