[Nos jeunes gens modernes] Alexis Langlois, the queer filmmaker who is shaking up French cinema

We know how much the history of queer cinema is a matter of troupes, of artistic families united by an often exclusive loyalty around a filmmaker – Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Antiteater, John Waters’ Dreamlanders. Alexis Langlois’ band has no name. We could hear about the Terrors at the time of the release of his short film, Terror, my sisters! in 2019, but nothing official. Raya Martigny, one of his muses, speaks with a bit of mockery about “the Factory of Alexis Langlois”. With or without a name, this troupe is approaching its fifteen years of existence, marked by the triumphs of its short films then the consecration this year of a first feature, The Queens of Drama, presented at Critics’ Week in Cannes before a release at the end of summer.

It was in the Parisian queer party of the early 2010s that the destinies of the director and future figures of his cinema were linked, Raya Martigny, Dustin Muchuvitz, Nana Benamer and Naëlle Dariya, “at the Flash Cocotte and Trou aux Biches evenings in particular”, remembers Muchuvitz. They are models, actresses or DJs, a bit of all that, or will soon become one; Some of them have long-established desires for cinema, while others have not at all planned to take such a path; They are, finally, many of them trans women.

Langlois, who learned cinema with feverish avidity as an adolescent game, spending his time parodying clips and cartoons on camcorder with his sister Justine, first films them in a striking first short directly ripped from their own life, Trifles and dark ideas. Immersed in a half-Dionysian, half-melancholic after-party, an ethnography in love with a nocturnal-morning fauna mixing drag and tramps, the film is sublime and above all unique in its filmography, in that it still remains anchored to reality, to documentary border – a real party preceded the filming and the performers are as chemically altered as they appear.

From his second short and until his transition to the feature, Langlois takes up residence in the kingdom of the false, of stylistic excess, of artisanal artifices, rubbing his cinema with the codifications of the musical, of teen movie (At your age the sorrow passed quickly), joyful horror, plunging into a dreamlike woven with vengeful impulses emanating from young trans women (Terror, my sisters!) or mistreated directors (Dorothy’s Demons), never missing an opportunity to adorn his performers with monstrously baroque SFX makeup inherited from his adolescent passion for Buffy.

Parallel to the explosion of a certain queer scene embodied in particular by Yann Gonzalez (A knife in the heart), Bertrand Mandico (After Blue (Dirty Paradise)) or Caroline Poggi and Jonathan Vinel (Jessica Forever), Langlois shares with her artistic partners (Marine Atlan, appointed operational director of Poggi and Vinel), performers (Félix Maritaud debauched from Savage for a hetero-beef counter-employment in Of the terror…), but not necessarily the often lyrical, poetic and romantic register of the dialogues, which we find less in his cinema. “I believe that my lyricism is found in the settings, in the image, in the music. In the text, I need humor, or to remain very concrete to move the story forward.”

From Terror, my sisters!, the success is relatively colossal. Relatively, because obviously limited to the peanuts in audience that alternative distribution can grant to a trashy and queer short film; colossal, because no French short film maker has probably had such media coverage since… Alain Guiraudie? Award-winning and featured on the front page of a magazine, the film was released in theaters and established a filmmaker who then became sufficiently popular to attract pop stars. Lio, as well as his personal icon Rebeka Warrior (Sexy Sushi, Kompromat), appear in the credits of his fourth short, Dorothy’s Demons. Bilal Hassani commissions a highly erotic clip magnetized by the presence of François Sagat.

His muses are taking off: Raya Martigny is pursuing a sumptuous career as a model at a time when fashion is opening up to trans bodies; Dustin lends his face and first name to a short film selected at Cannes. “I would not have had this life without Alexis, I would not have had the courage to act, and perhaps not this sense of community, of the troupe either”, assures the latter. Martigny, more nuanced on Pygmalionism (“We guide him as much as he guides us, it’s not mentoring”), clearly embodies the democratization of the queer underground that Langlois’ cinema has accompanied in its own way, notably through its participation in the box office of Drag Race France.

Langlois hasn’t even released his first feature yet but already has a large group of fans – including Gio Ventura, main actor in Drama queens : “I discovered his courts and sent him a message of admiration on Facebook, to which he responded quite politely. I met him later at the Locarno festival and begged him to work together.” Such hype, worthy of the pop stars that the filmmaker has pantheonized in this first feature, would be enough to make people spin. He – or she, the conversation oscillating between masculine and feminine – has the elegance to respond with a deployment of scope, an elevation of his cinema to heights of great melodrama, half-pop, half-punk, furiously ambitious. It’s probably time to find a name for this gang.