Social Hygiene Review: Denis Côté Drolly Unpacks Male Privilege Across Time

Compellingly and surprisingly, the film doesn’t propose an entirely celebratory view of our accountability-seeking present.

Social Hygiene
Photo: Lou Scamble

A man stands in the center of a lush field, his slumped, fidgety body language bringing to mind a working schlub impatiently waiting for the evening train home. He’s joined some 20 to 30 feet away by a woman whose gaze he largely avoids. He talks at length about the pesky indignities of daily life and about a screenplay he’d like to write, while she sizes up his failings and delusions and offers counsel or recrimination. The wind blows and the birds sing, and a static camera captures it all from a healthy distance.

This is the dramatic setup that recurs, with some minor variation, eight times over the course of Denis Côté’s 75-minute Social Hygiene. In every case the man is Antonin (Maxim Gaudette), a philandering, philosophizing petty criminal who’s down on his luck, while the female role is occupied at different junctures by his sister, Solveig (Larissa Corriveau); his wife, Églantine (Evelyn Rompré); his mistress, Cassiopée (Eve Duranceau); his tax collector, Rose (Kathleen Fortin); and a victim of one of his robbery schemes, Aurore (Éléonore Loiselle). In their verbosity, simplicity of staging, and plein-air settings, these elongated tête-à-têtes suggest community theater, albeit with the snap and vigor of actors in full command of the comic and tragic turns in Côté’s material—a distinction that separates Social Hygiene from the amateur-driven and superficially similar work of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet.

Though these one-shot sequences comprise the majority of Côté’s film, there are also jarring detours from this established stylistic mode. In a handful of wordless scenes, well before she holds court with Antonin in Social Hygiene’s climactic exchange, Aurore is introduced wandering with seeming aimlessness through the woods. Unlike the rest of the ensemble, who wear gowns, suits, and other casual attire redolent of past eras, she’s dressed in blatantly contemporary clothing, and her crew-cut hair and penchant for dancing freely in the woods announce an unabashedly modern woman. Côté shoots these scenes with a handheld camera and employs more up-tempo editing, creating a formal disruption to match the one that Aurore will ultimately enact on Antonin’s sense of complacency.

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There are references to Facebook, McDonald’s, and the Seoul Olympics, but everyone’s manner of speaking—so eloquent and musical—evokes Age of Enlightenment mores, and the verdant landscape shots recall those of Stanley Kubrick’s 18th-century-set Barry Lyndon, the margins of the frame often smeared as if to mimic the imperfections of a painting. That this classical backdrop is host to scenes in which women hold a man in check marks a distinct inversion of the power dynamics of the eras being invoked, and herein lies Côté’s satirical aim.

The modern world has, of course, done much to topple the straight white male off his ill-gotten perch, and Côté has a bit of fun imagining what it might have looked like had this social rebalancing occurred centuries earlier. In the film’s ambiguous, anachronistic flattening of time periods, Antonin’s very body language seems to sag under the contemptuous gazes of his female foils, his romantic gestures are as wilted as the rose he impotently offers to Cassiopée, and, when moved to challenge the only other man in the film to a duel, the two simply circle each other with fists raised instead of reaching for flintlock pistols.

In its droll mockery of these archaic customs, the film is burlesquing a past in which a self-serious and egotistical ne’er-do-well like Antonin might have coasted by on far less public scrutiny from the fairer sex. Such a sardonic perspective might seem to imply an embrace of our more progressive now, but what’s so compelling about Social Hygiene is that it doesn’t propose an entirely celebratory view of our accountability-seeking present either. Antonin isn’t a rotten person so much as a misguided romantic whose sense of his own failings is bound up in an inherited expectation of male greatness. And his defiance of the demands of the women in his life—to get an honest job, to be faithful, to find stability—is an assertion of independence that ultimately leaves him miserable and spiritually bereft, an emotional endpoint writ large in an unexpected, astonishing close-up late in the film.

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These qualities are effortlessly embodied in Gaudette’s performance, which is as subtly physical as it is densely verbose; at times, his posture seems to defy gravity, bending against the wind in a stance that telegraphs both defensiveness and virility. Indeed, the physicality of all the actors is critical to Côté’s slow-burn comedy. In the company of Cassiopée, Antonin’s desire flows horizontally across the frame via his gazes and leans, while she, facing away, remains hesitant to the advances. But in the company of the other women, Antonin’s endless affectations of aloofness—burying his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground or the horizon as though anything is more interesting than the conversation at hand—are met with uncompromising body language. By framing these encounters at such a distance, to call attention to the way the body communicates as much as the face, Côté implies that the real social hygiene taking place in these verbal scuffles isn’t always in the words, but in the ways that people reveal themselves, and their souls, through their physical presence alone.

Score: 
 Cast: Maxim Gaudette, Éléonore Loiselle, Eve Duranceau, Larissa Corriveau, Kathleen Fortin, Evelyne Rompré  Director: Denis Côté  Screenwriter: Denis Côté  Running Time: 75 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021

Carson Lund

Carson Lund's debut feature as a DP and producer is Ham on Rye. He also writes for the Harvard Film Archive and is the frontman of L.A.-based chamber pop duo Mines Falls.

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