We had already been able to get an idea of the work of Alexis Langlois via his short film “Dorothy's Demons“, a sort of queer-pop bubble deploying a very pronounced taste for artifice and fetishism in the service of a plot already highlighting artistic creativity and the theme of the difficulty of loving. Very personal result, quite promising in its bill, but limited by its duration as well as by its concept.Drama Queens” had everything of the passing exam on the big screen, finally allowing us to know if its young author was going to be able to take flight. That said, there is no need to hide it: due to its premise and its trailer (already overloaded with tangible pop references and cascading iconizations), this first feature film left some apprehensions to glean. In general: the possibility of finding yourself face to face with a filmic UFO without any real direction, the full-frame exhibition of a self-centered queer imagination which would exclude the uninitiated, even a potential parade of XXL artifices and effects of style hype for TikTok's congested people. In the end, this is not the case. Because Alexis Langlois not only knew how to aim broadly while being well aware of the real meaning of the word “popular”, but above all because he knew how to manipulate, with tact and personality, the daunting art of mixing genres without trying to “do it like it” (basically, without going out of your way to be clever with the elements and references that it manipulates). The result, singular and generous in all stages of production, resembles nothing known and already smells very strongly of the scent of worship.
The craziest thing about it is having taken the risk of reappropriating the narrative and aesthetic canons of several media forms (in this case the TV hook genre New Star and YouTube channels with their vloggers full of hysterical show-off) to deflect its logic from the angle of the queer imagination. In this respect, it is absurd to criticize the film for endlessly using kitsch gimmicks and full-throttle self-parody, since all the strength of this imagination lies in the fact of reappropriating codes and modes to rework them from an angle that could not be more colorful. Alexis Langlois therefore acts as an uninhibited DJ, kneading and compiling everything that can stimulate his filmmaker's eye and his cinephile cortex. So jostle here jostling for various nods to George Cukor, to Pedro Almodovar, to Jean Genet, to teenage pop music stars (Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, Mylène Farmer, Alizée or Ophélie Winter), to the cryto-M6 media competition against the backdrop of Shakespearean romance, with a transgender musical to make the addicts of Drag Raceor even the most outrageous artifices of cartoons and cinephile pastiche. Reality and fantasy thus collide with each other for all-round filtering, a breeding ground for an incommensurable energy which never slows down over a little less than two jam-packed hours.
What we get out of it is in no way a rough draft that draws on all sorts of ideas without concern for coherence. Revisiting the vagaries of rise and fall d’”A star is born” from the angle of post-adolescent romantic rivalry (a sufficiently familiar benchmark to start on a good basis), the story is based on a solid structure which places emotional identification above mere visual enjoyment (even if it It is sometimes here the second which supports the first), and ensures that its references are placed in the right narrative articulations instead of blindly collapsing them. The use of musical codes, here a source which generates passages to the point of view. both very funny and very crude (it's not every day you'll hear songs like Go muscular or Fisted to the core !), follows the same logic by aiming to capture as precisely as possible the sentimental variations of the protagonists, their reciprocal transformations according to the ordeals they go through, their quasi-punk anger which is constantly tinged with a deep melancholy, and also, more generally, the musical currents, sometimes lyrical, sometimes colorful, which characterize the queer galaxy. Finally, by superimposing on all this the structure of a tale narrated backwards by a gossip-loving YouTuber, Langlois cubes the fantasy reading of his story, as if to better mythologize his queer icons and elevate them in fine among colorful icons in a final climax more open to interpretation than it seems.
It is, however, obvious that the process encounters its own limits from time to time, such a quantity of plastic work being in fact conditioned to be familiar with its own overheating sooner or later in isolation. Just as certain spectators, undoubtedly unfamiliar with such a surge of aesthetic and sensory codes, risk having difficulty feeling like they are in their slippers after five minutes and staying at the dock cursing without nuance. However, even if “Drama Queens” strongly supports his approach as a living and vibrant anthology of queer culture, the generosity he demonstrates (infinitely cooler and respectable than the clean asceticism of a stuck-up derche filmmaker), the romantic power that he stops fidgeting at a deliberately irregular speed (those who love experiencing a thousand contradictory emotions outside of their daily lives will be in heaven) and the highly inhabited performance of its performers (aside from the astonishing Gio Ventura and Louiza Aura, special mention to Bilal Hassani in a rather unexpected role) are right here for the slightest criticism.Meetings after midnight” by Yann Gonzalez, we find ourselves here again faced with an evanescent first film, as rich in singularity as in melancholy, where the play on artifice is in no way synonymous with artificiality and where the universality of emotions aims to transcending fashions and strong opinions It's alive because it vibrates on the screen, it's vibrant because it's experienced on the big screen.
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