THE “WORLD” OPINION – A MUST SEE
We were looking forward to the first feature of Alexis Langlois, who had already graced us with sparkling, perfectly unforgettable shorts and mid-lengths, and whose titles alone give us a pretty clear idea of his desire to shake the cock of French cinema: Trifles and dark thoughts (2016), At your age, pain passes quickly (2017), Terror, my sisters! (2019). A queer cinema with a kitsch that explodes in your eyes and where each film is still charged with the energy of filming, this great celebration celebrating bodies and faces that you will not see anywhere else.
A postmodern and ultra-referential director, we recognize Alexis Langlois’ touch in orchestrating the crushing encounter between popular culture and more academic stuff: reality TV and Fassbinder, Britney Spears and Kenneth Anger, Mariah Carey and John Waters, Werner Schroeter and the Instagram aesthetic. Why sorting?
Selected at the last Cannes Critics’ Week, Drama Queens begins in 2055: Steevyshady (Bilal Hassani), a botoxed YouTuber, revisits for his loyal subscribers the incandescent destiny of a pop star, Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura), and her passionate affair with punk icon Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura).
In constant overdrive
Ambition, casting, glory and descent into hell: the film unfolds along a narrative that could not be more classic than “the rise and fall movie” to better dynamite it from the inside with a swarm of images, pastiches and tributes: there a clip that looks like Britney Spears, a parody of the telecrochet “New Star”, a YouTube video, a TV, a pop or metal concert. The world is a stage where a clandestine lesbian passion is played out: because how can you love a woman when you are a pop star, the most mainstream and, a priori, the most heterosexual?
We are obviously thinking of the movida Almodovar period: like him, Alexis Langlois sees the plot of a film as a pop canvas that organizes all the images stored in the brain of this child of the 2000s Cinema, Internet, television: its relation to reality is mediated by a torrent of references to be digested, recycled, parodied. The image holds the place of the world, whether it is the decline of a pop star, a poster in a teenager’s bedroom, a paparazzi – we will recognize in Mimi Madamour, a powerful tribute to the burned destiny of Britney Spears.
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