Cannes 2024 – On how to be a man in more ways than one

Christophe Honoré’s brilliant new film, Marcello Mio, is based on an act as impulsive as it is insane: taking a dead man’s clothes and suddenly believing oneself to be him. This is not the only film seen between yesterday and today that performs such a spell. In Santosh by filmmaker Sandhya Suri, the heroine dons the police uniform of her husband, who was murdered in the line of duty, and finds herself propelled to his post, confronted to the impunity of Indian society when it comes to femicides. In Antoine Chevrollier’s Block Pass, the deceased teenager’s best friend dons his motocross gear to complete the championship on his behalf, thus fulfilling his father’s competitive ambitions. Finally, in Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia, a widow portrayed by Catherine Frot gives her husband’s clothes, from sweaters to underpants, to the young man who moves in with her. 

In all four films, donning the clothing of a deceased person – in this case, always a male figure – redistributes the garments of masculinity, the better to free oneself from them. Through the resurrected myth of her father, Chiara Mastroianni invents a camp and queer persona. Santosh‘s policewoman goes through a process of empowerment that is accompanied by a painful feminist awakening. The grieving young hero of Block Pass rejects his father’s authority and the destructive homophobia that goes with it. In Guiraudie’s work, latent homoeroticism invents new and tender masculinities. 

To be a man in a different manner is what these films propose, each in its own way. The invention of the self is within the reach of clothes, and allows us to turn everything upside down: gender identity, sexuality and homophobic, criminal patriarchy. Through these operations of dressing and undressing, these films accomplish a process of the deconstruction of masculinities that are thus laid bare, most often that of the father figure. Above all, they show the extent to which the question of identity seems to have evolved, become more fluid and subject to variation.

Infringing upon the barriers of heteronormativity, these films question our identities and show just how fluid they can be. While Emilia Perez presented a rather binary vision of trans-identity a few days ago, Christophe Honoré’s Marcello Mio is perhaps the most important queer film of the competition, because its fluidity of gender and sexual orientation is conceived of through form, and follows a constant process of invention. 

Traduction Emma Frigo