Shelley Duvall likened sex with Woody Allen in Annie Hall to a Kafkaesque experience. La Moustache is less inscrutable than Alvy Singer to merit the same assessment, but don’t hold what others are saying about it against writer-director Emmanuel Carrère. Adapted by Carrère and Jérôme Beaujour from the former’s novel, the film is an unpretentious blank slate—almost without a point but so unassuming that it earns consideration.
Marc (Vincent Lindon) tells his wife, Agnès (Emmanuelle Devos), that he’s going to shave off his moustache, but when he does it, no one, including his friends, appears to notice (or remember that he even had one). An impasse is subsequently reached when he’s threatened with institutionalization for harping on the issue. Marc then runs off to Hong Kong, where he plays out a less inscrutable version of Michel Subor’s existential crisis from The Intruder.
I prefer the mysterious textures of Agnes Godard’s camerawork and Stuart Staples’s ambient-techno drone for that Claire Denis film. But the waterlogged, mirror-obsessed imagery of La Moustache, along with the repeated use of “Concerto for Violin and Orchestra” by Philip Glass, succinctly expresses the idea of conscious and unconscious forces battling for attention.
Carrère’s film is scarcely forceful, inviting any and all interpretations but never daring one itself. So, does that expose the filmmaker as a philosopher without a point of view or indicate a refreshing form of art-house charity on his part? Perhaps that’s for us to interpret as well.
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