READER SUBMITTED CONTENT I like to think I’m a perceptive friend. When you start using a new eyeliner, get new shoes, or start being an asshole, I notice.
I like to think I’m a perceptive friend. When you start using a new eyeliner, get new shoes, or start being an asshole, I notice. And I think we can all attest to just how good it feels when others notice changes in our appearance. Today my 82-year-old grandmother commented that my eyebrows were darker and more defined than usual. She was right, I had penciled them in a bit. Her tuning into subtle changes in my appearance can mean only two things: she loves me and I matter.
So you can imagine the horror that Marc Thiriez (played by a French actor who banged the Princess of Monaco in the ’90s) feels when everyone he knows fails to notice he has shaved off the mustache he’s worn his entire life. Not only that, but they deny he’s ever had one. The film is called La Moustache and it’s French. Uhhhmm…YES.
The film starts with Marc in a bathtub, shaving. I’ve never been to France, I’ve never been in a man’s bathtub, and I’ve never shaved my face, but does this really happen? Shaving your face in the same water you soak in for an hour? All I can think about is emerging as Burt Reynolds. Bearded ass.
ANYWAY Marc asks his wife, Agnes (who looks like a mix between Penelope Cruz and the Family Guy version of Julia Roberts) what she would think about him without a mustache. She tells him she wouldn’t know what to think, she wouldn’t know him without it. Marc secretly shaves it, looks eerily like a puppet due to lack of lips, plays a game of hiding for awhile, and when he reveals his face…nothing. At all. His wife looks at him as she’s always looked at him. In fact, his friends and coworkers don’t notice the lack of ‘stache either.
Aaaand the rest of the movie is a mind fuck. You start out thinking his wife is crazy and then you think, “I don’t know…this bitch is making sense right now…” AND THEN when he somehow ends up in Hong Kong, you will question your own sanity. Truly, there was a moment when I looked up from the screen and down at my toes and thought, “Am I fucking alive right now? Who am I and why?”
I’ve read reviews of this movie to the point of nausea and still haven’t come to my own conclusion about its message yet. And yes, I’m one of those movie idiots that MUST have a conclusion. Seeing Eyes Wide Shut at the age of 11 really fucked up my movie watching capabilities. You know what I mean.
However, I do know La Moustache is trying to talk about our identity and how we establish, measure, and maintain it. Or maybe it’s just saying: DO NOT SHAVE YOUR MOUSTACHE; you’ll lose your mind and look like Bert.
- Molly Jones
oh, wowww.
Tehee
you’ve kindled my interest.. c’monnnn bittorrents!
EYES wide shut @11? How old is yous?
I thought having an identity crisis was strictly a pcp thing. Not from a moustache movie.
Shows what I know.
I loved this film. I think it has a lot to do with peoples’ tendency to familiarity- and the corporeal you versus the “spirit” of you…. however hippy-dippy that gets. Like Flannery O’Connor’s “Man of my Dreams”
@SARS:
eyes wide shut came out 10 years ago so… 21?
yes, the 90s were aaages ago
I thought the ending was bullshit.
What would happen if you put vintage Tom Selleck’s mustache on vintage Burt Reynolds and vintage Burt Reynolds mustache on vintage Tom Selleck? (Somebody photoshop that for me, I’m lazy.)
Because it was always like nobody ever told them how fuckin weird they looked whenever they didn’t have hair on their lips.
My dad shaved off his moustache when my mom moved out and threatened a divorce. It was a power stache, he looked powerless, like a unicorn with no horn, like a sick animal.
“Dad, what did you do?”
“I got too close trimming out gray hairs.”
“Don’t ever do that again, grow it back right away, you don’t look right”
He gave me an extremely uncomfortable and awkward smile. I had never seen his thin pale upper lip take shape like that. It was worse than the only time I saw him cry.
DAD’s DO NOT SHAVE YOUR MO’s it fucks your kids up! and you lose all your secret powers.
Wow, great post. Very genuine. You can step into my tub anytime.