Anaïs Demoustier and Romain Duris (Cohen Media)
I’m going to spoil The New Girlfriend for you. It’s not like I’m spoiling Psycho; but the two are not unrelated.
After her best friend Laura dies, Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) discovers that Laura’s husband David (Romain Duris) is grieving in a most peculiar manner: he’s dressing as a woman, wearing his late wife’s clothes.
You may be forgiven for thinking this was already an Adam Sandler movie, or that it soon will be. But director François Ozon (Swimming Pool, Under the Sand) is one of the few contemporary directors whom you could call Hitchcockian without it being a completely empty boast.
David—or Virginia, as Claire comes to call her as she tries to keep her new friend from her husband—may seem the obvious subject of a topical comedy, and is the focus alright, the focus of Claire. The movie begins as a coffin lid closes over Laura’s dead body, dressed in her wedding gown. Flashback to Claire and Laura’s friendship, which goes back to childhood. The pair were inseparable, and on Laura’s wedding day, Claire’s jealous glance at the happy couple clearly telegraphs the film’s concerns. The sight of 6’ 4” Romain Duris, whose transformation suggests a cross between David Johansen and Rita Tushingham, may well lead one to think the movie is playing with gender identity. It certainly is, but not the way you think.
At first, Claire is horrified by her discovery, and doesn’t buy David’s thinly veiled excuse that his and Laura’s young toddler Lucie is comforted by his motherly presence. “After all, every child needs a mother.“ “And a father,” Claire is quick to point out.
But the political dynamic that would have made the film simply topical turns into a psychological dynamic that makes the film and its relationships more complicated and unpredictable. Ozon isn’t content to play the material just for broad comedy, though he does, even indulging in a few sitcom-worthy gestures like when Claire warns David that she can see his lipstick as he’s hugging his mother-in-law. But the director revels in the chance to inject Some Like it Hot with dark touches of Vertigo and, yes, Psycho.
Claire agrees to take Virginia shopping, and at the end of the day they sit in a cafe cheerfully excited by their ruse, but the camera slowly zooms in on the pair as if something more ominous is about to happen. In a way, it already has, as the name of the film has already explained: Claire doesn’t buy David’s excuse that his behavior is for the well-being of their child—it’s for his own pleasure. But it’s also for Claire’s pleasure; she wasn’t close to David before she discovered his secret, but as Virginia passes he becomes a replacement for her late friend.
The New Girlfriend may be relatively subtle, but for Ozon it’s fairly obvious, if well-crafted. I’m sure an American remake is already in the works, and I’m equally sure it won’t have this film’s ambiguous dynamic. It comes ready with an American pop soundtrack, though the sight of Claire and Virginia shopping to Katy Perry’s “Hot and Cold” (song) seems subversive more than celebratory; an indictment of the packaging of pop stars.
Ozon doesn’t take sides in the proceedings; he’s just observing, and much as Claire projects Laura onto David, the viewer may well project their own feelings onto the film. All the more reason an Adam Sander remake may be a horrible but fascinating inevitability.
—
