The New Girlfriend
Une nouvelle amie
François Ozon (2014)
Cinema adaptations of Ruth Rendell’s fiction include Pedro Almodóvar ’s Live Flesh (1997). The latter’s oeuvre is famously rich in sexual crossovers but François Ozon’s The New Girlfriend – based, very loosely, on a Rendell short story of the same name – makes the gendering in Almodóvar’s world relatively straightforward. Ozon’s film certainly deserves its place in this year’s BFI Flare festival: it has L, G, B and T elements. Laura and Claire, close friends from childhood, marry David and Gilles respectively. Laura and David have a baby, whom they call Lucie. Laura dies a few months later. Some weeks after the funeral, Claire calls on David at home and finds him caring for Lucie and dressed in women’s clothes. The New Girlfriend centres on the relationship between Claire and David – who adopts the name Virginia for his transgender identity – that develops from this point. At the end of the story, ‘seven years later’, Claire has left Gilles. She and David-Virginia are a settled couple, bringing up Lucie together.
I came out of The New Girlfriend not at all clear of the nature of Claire and David’s attraction to each other. At one point in the story, when Claire asks if he’s gay, David replies that he’s turned on by men only in the sense that he’s aroused by the knowledge that a man finds him attractive when he’s dressed as a woman. Much later on, Claire can’t go through with sex with David-Virginia; she recoils from the false breasts he wears. How do they function as a couple? Is it through accepting her own bisexuality that Claire is attracted to David-Virginia as both a man and a woman? Is David’s heterosexual orientation a reason for his wanting to live, even as Virginia, with Claire? Perhaps theirs isn’t a sexual relationship at all but a companionship? After reading an interview with François Ozon in the BFI programme notes, I understood even less. The writer-director explains that ‘the main point is to see how each character accepts the peculiarity of the other and finds his or her identity beyond gender, beyond masculine or feminine’. In the next breath, Ozon says, ‘Claire and Virginia don’t want to see that they’re in love because they’re caught up in social and familial intentions, but their desire is stronger in the end’. These statements may be impenetrable partly because of clumsy translation from the French. (Should ‘intentions’ read ‘conventions’?) But what, in any case, is the meaning of ‘desire’, a word charged with sexual implication, when it’s no longer related to gender?
Ozon notes in the same interview that the death of the Laura character doesn’t occur in the Ruth Rendell story. This addition both complicates and weakens his film. When Claire first sees David in drag, he explains that he used to cross-dress before he was with Laura, that she knew about his former habit and that, once they were a couple, his transvestite urges disappeared. David also tells Claire that he now needs to be both father and mother to Lucie, and implies that he feels closer to the wife he loved if he wears her clothes and her perfume. These ideas are interesting; so is the hint that Claire, when she styles David’s wig to resemble Laura’s coiffure, wants to recreate her lost friend. None of this, however, is followed through: Ozon is chiefly interested in exploring cosmetic and textural aspects of femininity. The New Girlfriend could have been a more substantial piece if David hadn’t had a cross-dressing past – if, crazed with grief, he’d started wearing his dead wife’s clothes for the reasons he first suggests to Claire and had then discovered that he enjoyed being a girl, drawn – like the man behind the camera – to the artifices of dressing up, making up and depilation.
David appears to love his child less than he loves shopping and it’s no surprise that Ozon’s handling of the principals’ feelings of bereavement is perfunctory. When Claire speaks at the funeral, she talks about ‘falling in love’ with Laura as soon as they met. The following montage of moments from their relationship over the years presents Laura as forthright and glamorous, Claire as relatively mousy and diffident. The montage also makes clear that Claire has a crush, at least, on her friend-for-life. (Almost needless to say, as kids they cut their hands to seal their blutsschwesterschaft.) In a conversation between David and Gilles, some time after Laura’s death, Claire’s supposedly unobservant husband mentions, quite casually, that he used to wonder if she was sexually attracted to Laura. (The dynamic between Laura and Claire recalls the younger versions of the women played by Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Fonda in Julia. As becomes clear later in that film, small-minded people think they are lesbians too.) As his friendship with Claire develops, David invites her to spend the weekend with him at the house of his parents-in-law (who are away and looking after Lucie). This is the house where Laura grew up and one which Claire therefore knows well. It’s not long after she and David arrive there that Claire sees an apparition of Laura but only for a moment. This is typical of the eye-catching superficiality of Ozon’s approach: her dead friend’s home would have much stronger and more extensive associations for Claire than the film suggests. The emotional significance of the house is a specific example of an issue that’s ignored more generally: it’s hard to believe that, if she really still has Laura in her head and heart, Claire isn’t offended for longer, and for reasons beyond conventionality, by David’s expanding transsexuality.
The more Ruth Rendell I’ve read, the less impressed I’ve been by the plot construction but I can’t think that Rendell would have perpetrated the sloppy plotting on which François Ozon often depends. David, when Claire first discovers his secret, begs her to keep it and insists that cross-dressing is something he does only in the privacy of his own home: why then does he leave the front door unlocked so that anyone can wander in, as Claire has just done? When she goes away with David, Claire tells her husband she’s spending the weekend at her mother’s. Since she’s shown as being anxious about lying to Gilles, it’s improbable that she both forgets to phone him while she’s away and hasn’t already taken steps to guard against Gilles finding out from her mother that Claire isn’t with her, which of course he does. At the climax to the film, David-Virginia, after Claire has rejected him-her, is knocked down by a car and lies unconscious in the street, in women’s clothes. At the hospital, Laura’s parents reveal this to Claire and Gilles before swearing them to secrecy. I was ready for a nonsense moment like the one in Gone Girl, when medical staff put Rosamund Pike in a hospital gown but leave her daubed in the blood of the man she’s murdered. But no: when Ozon cuts to David lying in bed, in a coma, his dress, wig and make-up have all been removed. So why does his mother-in-law bother telling Claire and Gilles about the drag outfit at all? Ozon’s answer to these various questions might be that The New Girlfriend is concerned with fantasies, is not a realistic drama. I don’t have a problem with the thoroughly fantastical elements – such as comatose David’s eyelids fluttering for the first time when Claire addresses him as Virginia or his regaining consciousness when Claire dresses him in Virginia’s clothes. The story is nevertheless based in the real world (it would be meaningless if it were not). When the characters behave merely implausibly, the story is diluted; the deliberately unreal elements are weakened by not having a robust reality from which to depart.
When Claire dreams of making love to Laura and wakes horrified, what is she horrified by – the very idea of being lesbian or that her love for Laura specifically was based in sexual desire? When, after a game of tennis (David and Claire vs Gilles), she goes into the men’s showers, what is she curious about or expecting to find? Although Claire has no reason to think or fear that David and Gilles are sexually interested in each other, she sees them making love in the shower. This too is then revealed as in her imagination – the two men are in the shower but not up to anything exciting there. These fantasies are included, I think, simply in order to elaborate the film’s tapestry of sexual ambiguity. François Ozon sometimes does this successfully: for example, Claire’s dressing Virginia back to life is rhymed with an earlier sequence in which David recalls clothing (in her bridal dress!) the dead, naked, coffined body of Laura. Ozon puts on a great cosmetic show and, with his cameraman Pascal Marti, creates some striking images but The New Girlfriend isn’t much more than its surface sophistication. It’s not disciplined enough to be satisfying at a deeper level – although the warm applause in NFT3 as the film ended suggested otherwise. The visuals and the fuzzy be-whoever-you-want-to-be moral of the story are evidently all that some people need.
I wouldn’t have expected from his roles to date that Romain Duris could easily project an indefinite sexuality. From his first appearance here, when David (not in drag) is introduced to Laura, Duris’s face has a glazed, vaguely androgynous quality – although this may be partly the result of being made up to appear much younger than he actually is. He’s more convincing throughout as a sexually ambiguous man than as a transsexual: that’s clearly not what David-Virginia means to be and I wasn’t sure it was Duris and Ozon intended either. With his strong jawline and in spite of his slenderness, Duris always looks, en travesti, like a man pretending to be a woman (the effect is the same even when David has become a more experienced and subtle cross-dresser). Anaïs Demoustier, as Claire, is very right as an attractive young woman who is basically ordinary and fearfully experiencing the extraordinary. As Laura, the wan Isild Le Besco also seems well cast, especially when she’s meant to be a corpse. Aurore Clément and Jean-Claude Bolle-Reddat are amusing as her parents. Raphaël Personnaz, as the super-straight Gilles, is probably meant to be a joke too – but I liked this actor, whom I’d not seen before. His relaxedness and wit give Personnaz’s characterisation a suppleness that the script doesn’t supply. While David-Virginia is in his coma, Claire and Gilles, who don’t yet have children of their own, adopt Lucie and Gilles loves being a father. I felt sorry that Claire left him but hopeful that, ‘seven years later’, Gilles would have a new partner and kids too. I thought he deserved a happy ending as much as the others.
26 March 2015