New Clothes for Temporary Transvestites? Sexuality, Cross-dressing and Passing in the Contemporary French Film Comedy

Abstract

During the 1990s, directors working in ‘popular’ cinema began to turn their attention to gay desires, relationships and lifestyles. This article examines four films which focus on homosexuality: Pédale douce (Aghion, 1996); L'Homme est une femme comme les autres (Zilberman, 1998); Le Derrière (Lemercier, 1997) and Le Placard (Veber, 2001). Each film adopts and revises a staple plot of the ‘mainstream’ comic film: the ‘temporary’ transvestite narrative (Strayer, C. ( ) ‘Re-dressing the “natural”: the temporary transvestite film’, Wide Angle, vol. 14, no. 1, pp. 36–55). However, in addition to donning the appearance and mannerisms of their gender opposite, the protagonists of these films also masquerade as their homosexual other. Through a combination of textual and contextual analysis and an examination of both critical and audience reception, the article explores the issues raised by the images as well as the responses they generate among their spectators. A small-scale qualitative audience study is used to illustrate some of the views held by individual spectators.

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