Vincent Lindon, Emmanuelle Devos, Mathieu Amalric. Stick it out and you will appreciate a picture about a couple experiencing a strange hallucinatory moment in their marriage. Possibly the most boring movie I have ever watched. I can't wait to see it again.

This is consistent with the film. Devos buys Lindon a garish green jacket that wouldn't have fit either of their tastes before. Ça sollicite, ça inquiète, fascine le désir qui pourtant ne se laisse pas séduire. The character thus continues to inhabit the fringes of society, surrounded by an inpenetrable and, above all, indivisible lack or excess of common sense that only he perceives. With his thin-lipped grimace and big, soulful eyes, Lindon's an ideal actor for this sort of puzzle.

Music title data, credits, and images provided by, Movie title data, credits, and poster art provided by. An Introduction to Jacques Lacan through Popular Culture. (43), We can not but hesitate between two interpretations, two concurrent readings : either he is crazy, or the others are. In fact, Freud addresses the role of solitude in his development of the notion of estrangement from self or others: Quant à la solitude, au silence et à l’obscurité, nous ne pouvons rien en dire, sinon que ce sont là effectivement les facteurs déterminants auxquels s’attache chez la plupart des humains une angoisse enfantine qui ne s’éteint jamais tout à fait” (L’inquiétante étrangeté 139). by Alessandra M. Pires In addition to delving into it physically, he embarks on extended journeys in order to confirm his own sanity and thus prove the insanity of the other(s), a maneuver that produces the same result as digging in the garbage: If the protagonist is in fact sane and everyone else is crazy, then he is much like a person with obsessive-compulsive disorder (linked to an unresolved, recurrent fear of some unknown desire) as Adam Philipps puts it ; “As in neurosis, we are pursuing something by running away from it. The ferry, for some reason, also evokes Charon ferrying the dead to Hades. A thought (an obsession), an action, a defense mechanism, seen as a sequence of complex behaviours qualified as compulsions, in which a failure to overcome them is felt as a surge of anxiety. . THERE he shares a perception of the world with other people. . (editor’s translation). 1 “Emmanuel Carrère est un auteur à succès, non pas parce qu’il est l’invité des médias ou défraie la chronique, par son comportement ou ses prises de position, mais parce que ses œuvres, en dépit de sa discrétion, touchent un large public et que la critique, d’accord avec ses lecteurs, le reconnaît comme un écrivain origial et profond.” (Bardet Interview with Emmanuel CARRÈRE 3). A moustache sparks memories and feelings for a 17-year-old boy and his grandmother in this short story. (9). According to Bardet and Caron, “La Moustache peut être lue comme la description minucieuse d’un cas clinique, le récit d’une décompensation brutale qui révèle une paranoïa pathologique.” (37). But not so funny in La Moustache, the feature-film debut that thriller-novelist Emmanuel Carrère adapted from his book. 22 minutes (5475 words), “Being mad […] can mean acting as if one were sane.” (Phillip Going Sane 3-4). Thus he ultimately imposes his desire to be observed, but in a torturous way, because he does not realize the exposure to which he is subjected nor the desire that drives him to expose himself to the answer he seeks for that which he lacks. ), etc. Žižek, Slavoj.

Shades of Fellini, but not quite so frustrating.

Mike, who has recently grown a moustache, goes to visit his grandmother in her nursing home. (Freud, The Uncanny, 234). It seems he does not grasp neither the logic of time nor the space that surrounds him. Here Agnès again challenges the reliability of Marc’s memory and questions his sanity, and in turn he embarks on a phase full of doubts, questions, and investigations, such as the futile search for his parent’s home mentioned above — another supposed blank in his memory — and his wife’s mention that his father had died a year earlier, another event Marc cannot recall. (Kristeva, Pouvoirs de l’horreur 12), It is not the absence of cleanliness or health that renders the abject, but that which disturbs an identity, a system, an order.

Side Effects. Given the above details, it is relevant to this reading of La moustache to underscore certain insights borrowed from the discourse of psychoanalysis, including the Freudian motif of estrangement and the double or multiple identities that Marc gradually discovers within himself.

His wife and friends and fellow workers perceive it all differently, that he shaved his moustache years ago. The film is an unpretentious blank slate—almost totally without point but so unassuming it earns consideration. Freud, S. (1919).

It was an admirable project with some good moments. Phillips, Adam.

This makes sense if we accept Phillips’ contention that “[M]adness resists definition . I regret watching it - wasting time. (editor’s translation). The protagonist is then overcome by a flood of confusing thoughts that lead him to insist on and persist in understanding the absence of his mustache, as well as the effect that it has or has not had on his friends, his wife, and himself. The ‘Uncanny’. Terror and Other Experts. The moment of surprise occurs when Marc’s wife, who has seen him just minutes before he takes his bath and shaves off the mustache, does not notice the change. 2 The terms analyzing and analyzed come from the field of psychoanalysis and are applicable once an relationship of analysis, in which the subject has become the analyzed, has been established. It becomes clear that the existence or non-existence of a mustache would lead to the realization of the status Marc unconsciously seeks in order to live a proper life, comme il faut, in accordance with the norms of his social class,. The quest for sanity never ends. In a gesture reflecting the film’s fragmented narrative, let us return to the beginning, when the spectator experiences the same surprise as Marc upon confirming that none of his colleagues notice the absence of his mustache. Although this article deals directly with the film interpretation of La Moustache, it should be noted that the film is based on the Carrère’s novel of the same name. The fourth moment in which water imagery plays a key role is during Marc’s trip to Hong Kong and to Bali, a continued flight from involuntary psychiatric internment. The mustache itself had somehow kept the character “compensated” as a human being living a trivial existence, and the denial of the mustache by others causes his identity crisis. Although other sets of eyes involved in this intrigue would like to occupy this privilieged position of examining, or, better yet, of listening — as in psychoanalysis — to the other, here it is the protagonist’s place to be heard, even as he believes he is the listener. In any case, the psychiatric explanation, to the extent that it is assumed by the character himself, does not escape madness, if there is madness. Please enter your birth date to watch this video: You are not allowed to view this material at this time.

One such instance in which Marc attempts to observe himself is linked to time. We can only say that what is novel can easily become frightening and uncanny” (Freud, 219-220).

The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917-1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works, 1919, 217-256. And at the same time it asks us to wonder why we should want to do this . (Laplanche et Pontalis 84), Clinically, a type of escape which the subject is pushed toward by an internal constraint. “Disaster of Disguise: Emmanuel Carrère’s Counterfeiters.” NY: Bookforum: The Book Review for Art and Culture. The most disconcerting aspect of this period, which seems to constitute a total blank in Marc’s life, is not just that Agnès does not notice the change in her husband’s appearance, but that she insists that she has never seen him with a mustache. Julia Kristeva indicates that the first traumatic experience that remains as a permanent presence initially correlates to a repulsion toward certain elements immediately related to language such as food, waste, feces, etc. No one notices. His wife shows up by surprise, behaving as if it were years ago (on the vacation of the photo)—and he shaves his beard—and moustache (just as she had said he did—in Bali 15 years ago).