THE “WORLD’S” OPINION – MUST SEE
We were eagerly awaiting the first feature film from Alexis Langlois, who had already graced us with sparkling, perfectly unforgettable short and medium-length films, and whose titles alone give us a fairly clear idea of his desire to shake the coconut tree of French cinema: Trifles and dark thoughts (2016), At your age, grief passes quickly (2017), Terror, my sisters! (2019). A queer cinema, with a kitsch that explodes in your eyes, and in which each film is still charged with the energy of the shoot, this great celebration celebrating bodies and faces that you will not see elsewhere.
Postmodern and ultra-referenced director, we recognize Alexis Langlois's touch by organizing the shattering encounter between popular culture and more scholarly things: reality TV and Fassbinder, Britney Spears and Kenneth Anger, Mariah Carey and John Waters, Werner Schroeter and the Instagram aesthetic. Why sort?
Selected at the last Cannes Critics’ Week, Drama Queens begins in 2055: Steevyshady (Bilal Hassani), a botoxed YouTuber, returns for his loyal subscribers to the incandescent destiny of a pop star, Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura), and her passionate affair with punk icon Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura).
In constant overdrive
Ambition, casting, glory and descent into hell: the film unfolds along a narrative that could not be more classic than « rise and fall movie » to better dynamite it from the inside with a swarm of images, pastiches and homages: there a clip resembling Britney Spears, a parody of the “New Star” telecrochet, a YouTube video, a TV set, a concert by pop or metal. The world is a stage where a clandestine lesbian passion is played out: because how can you love a woman when you are a pop star, everything that is most mainstream and, a priori, most heterosexual?
We obviously think of the Almodovar movida period: like him, Alexis Langlois sees the plot of a film as a pop canvas which organizes all the images stored in the brain of this child of the 2000s. Cinema, Internet, television: his report to reality is mediated by a torrent of references that must be digested, recycled, parodyed. The image takes the place of the world, whether it is that of the decline of a popstar, a poster in a teenager's bedroom, a paparazcon – we will recognize in Mimi Madamour, a strong homage to the burned destiny of Britney Spears.
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