Dry Cleaning (1997)

One of my all time favorites.

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

There are moments in this movie where the great movie it could've been peek out... They're fleeting, here, but they're worth savoring, and they happen often enough to make it worth your while.

the idea is far to be now. the performances - decent. in fact, correct use of stereotype who was imposed by Teorema. the young seductive man. the wife remembering Madame Bovary. the husband on the top of solitude. provocative scenes and dialogues. not real surprising end. the only memory after few years after I saw it - the atmosphere. the ambiguous sexuality, the crisis of marriage and the last decision. and nothing more because the film is just occasion to intrigue, seduce and propose an idea who represents part of many couples fear.

It's impossible - for me at least - to know whether or not Ann Fontaine was familiar with Joe Orton's sixties play Entertaining Mister Sloane (subsequently filmed)before writing and directing Nettoyage a sec some thirty years later but it is reasonable to assume that the central premise - bi-sexual catalyst male enters and ultimately disrupts household via sexual encounters with both male and female - is very similar with, in the case of the latter, a Gallic twist. Orton's protagonist disrupted a home occupied by a brother and sister both childless whilst Fontaine's shares a home with a married couple who have a child. There are, of course, other substantial differences, where Mr Sloane came, as it were, out of nowhere, Loic (Stanislas Merhar) is first encountered by Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berning) Kunstler in a club where he is performing a cross-dressing act with his sister Marilyn (Mathilde Seigner)and only goes to live with the Kunstlers some time later when Marilyn leaves both him and the act in favour of life with her boy friend. The Kunstlers have been married for some fifteen years and it may be said that the marriage has become as 'dry' as the dry cleaning business they own and is in need of sexual 'cleaning'. If so they came to the right place for the amoral Loic is happy to oblige, first by seducing Nicole - not terribly difficult as she was ripe for seduction - and then, with less success, Jean-Marie. What we have here is a fine, tightly written and directed script acted to perfection by the three principals and arguably the finest of Fontaines early films - Berning would later appear in her How I Killed My Father. Very definitely worth seeing.

(WARNING - CONTAINS MILD SPOILER) The somewhat unresolved nature of the very last scene is ultimately dissatisfying, leaving a feeling that the film may have been inherently overly familiar - a chronicle of a straight- laced, unsatisfied couple who taste forbidden fruit and are almost ruined by it. The film's air of calm scrutiny is generally engrossing though, as it sketches the quiet disappointments and compromises of rural small business; a life caught up by routine, where years go by without a vacation. The plot initially finds the couple fascinated by sheer difference, leaving an enjoyable ambiguity as to whether there's any real sexual attraction on Berling's part toward Merhar, or whether it's largely a matter of intertwined ego, loneliness, and a symbolic yielding to the limitations of his life (the sexual encounter here looks like a pure power play). But the film's restraint makes it easy to take for the most part as a low-key, well-observed black comedy, thriving on the contrast between the ultra-orderly dry cleaning business and the flashy excess of the cross-dressing scene.

Saw a humongously uninspired French movie, Dry Cleaning (Nettoyage a Sec), that the advertisers swear won Cesar awards all over the place, but is just a hodgepodge of every foreign movie cliche that might strike an upscale audience as profound: a sexually ambiguous stranger insinuates himself into the lives of a married couple, engaging them in sexual games that bring them to the brink of self-destruction. She's desolate without the young man; the husband wrestles with his denial that he's also turned on by the stranger. Of course this is "art theatre," so we are to suppose that every straight man is really a gay man who hasn't found out yet. On the other hand the homosexual aspect of the story becomes the vehicle that carries the husband into his own corner of hell, an idea that seemed arty thirty-odd years ago (The Sergeant; The Children's Hour) but now is just insulting to gays. And of course the story is dotted with major and minor sexual interludes and taunts, but relationships are left to angry, dissatisfying silences between not-particularly-interesting characters. Story elements are offered that suggest the plot could go somewhere else but instead lead nowhere (the young man's sister leaves and conceivably might return looking for him; the young man has genuine talent as a dry-cleaner and might make a life for himself beyond his "drifter" existence; the married couple thinks about moving to Canada). I think the filmmaker has a long way to go in justifying why he wanted to make this movie -- what he thought would make this film extraordinary compared to some other story about dissolving marriage or sexual curiosity. Imagine La Strada if Anthony Quinn just sat around and brooded. If Thomas Mann had written Dry Cleaning it would be called Death in Suburbia: except that, speaking strictly for myself, I think it's the audience that dies.