From France With Love by Mary Harrod

Author:Mary Harrod [Harrod, Mary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350225145
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
Published: 2021-01-28T00:00:00+00:00

Homosexuality and the Family

In her 2002 article on ‘queering the family’ through ‘fantasy and the performance of sexuality and gay relations’ in rom-coms Gazon maudit and Pourquoi pas moi? (Stéphane Giusti, 1999), Kate Ince argues that in these texts the paradigm of the bourgeois family shifts to accommodate queer identities. At the end of Gazon, lesbian Marijo has joined married couple Laurent and Loli as the triumvirate sets about raising the baby who is the product of a one-time liaison between Laurent and Marijo. Not only that but ‘difference proliferates’ as there is a hint that staunchly heterosexual Laurent may be starting an affair with another man. In Pourquoi pas moi?, several families come together in a Catalan country house for their children – including, unusually, three lesbians (and one gay man) – to break to them the news that they are homosexual. Thanks to the couple-swapping antics of the older generation, by the end of the film, ‘[a] wholesale “queering” of the family has occurred, which is reinforced by the new relationships forged’ (Ince 2002: 95–6). As Ince notes, the role of performance in constructing gender and identity (not to mention the Spanish setting echoing Almodóvar’s work) in the film feeds into its queer aesthetic, as for example when two mothers Diane and Sara’s feelings for each other are reawakened by singing a song together for the group. While these women – and Diane’s husband Tony – are both singers, Eva’s father is a world-famous torero, played by Johnny Hallyday. Even more excessive is the film’s finale, which – like visions of the Virgin Mary appearing before Chouchou – uses kitsch to create a ‘camp and sentimental’ decor and atmosphere, as ‘a spangle-attired cabaret singer atop an illuminated podium draped with semi-naked dancers clad as angels/cherubs performs a love song called “Crazy”’ (ibid: 95).

Pédale douce and also Crustacés adhere to Ince’s model. The 1996 film, as already mentioned, is set in the colourfully excessive world of Parisian drag, which – echoing Kath Weston’s (1991) description of the networks formed by some groups of homosexuals in San Francisco – operates in the film as an alternative kinship structure. Brassart rightly attributes Pédale douce’s huge success (3.9 million spectators) to changing attitudes about homosexuality in France. Hence gay Adrien’s assumption of paternity of another man’s child can be presented as positive – although biological father Alexandre does show up at the christening, prompting a ‘liberating’ final image of the parental trio and the baby driving around Paris in a car singing the highly camp ‘Sans contrefaçon’ by Mylène Farmer. Interestingly, in contrast to Tarr with Rollet’s (2001: 189) argument that the film’s ‘outrageous drag queens function primarily as an exotic backdrop to the development of a conventional, heterosexual romance’, for Brassart the film’s strength lies in the parallels it draws between gay and straight identities. Thus Adrien’s paternal desire echoes Alexandre’s wife’s fear of being separated from her husband, both of these being socially constructed – as feminist Elisabeth Badinter has observed in relation to parental care in L’Amour en plus (1980) (Brassart 2007: 234).

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