Hairdresser’s Husband, The (Blu-ray Review)
- Review Date: Sep 09, 2024
- Format: Blu-ray Disc
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Director
Patrice LeconteRelease Date(s)
1990 (July 9, 2024)Studio(s)
Lambart Productions/TFI Film (Kino Classics)- Film/Program Grade: A-
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A
- Extras Grade: B
Review
The Hairdresser’s Husband (Le mari de la coiffeuse, 1990) is an eccentric film about eccentric people basking in idealized romantic love so perfect it’s not without its consequences. I admired filmmaker Patrice Leconte’s previous work, Monsieur Hire (1989), and after seeing Roger Ebert rave about the film on At the Movies all those decades ago had wanted to see it but never did, until now. It wasn’t quite what I expected, nor I daresay it’s what anyone might expect.
As a boy, Antoine develops a sexual fixation with a fat yet pretty red-headed hairdresser at a seaside resort town in France who one day commits suicide. In his fifties, Antoine’s (Jean Rochefort) obsession is unabated; he’s determined to fulfil his lifelong dream of becoming a hairdresser’s husband, and finds his ideal match in beautiful brunette Mathilde (Anna Galiena). He proposes marriage to her the very first time she cuts his hair. This leaves her nonplussed, but a few weeks later, enthusiastically agrees to marry him.
In their married life, they rarely leave her shop. He tends to its business affairs but mostly sits blissfully on a waiting area-sofa, gazing at her lovingly. Occasionally he’ll grab her in a sexual way while she’s working on a customer, and after hours they have sex on the floor of the shop, no matter that passersby can see them through the shop’s entrance. Theirs is a perfect, passionate love. But can it last?
The film tells us precious little about Antoine and even less about Mathilde. In one sense, the film is impressively single-minded. In flashbacks to his boyhood days, we learn how Antoine became fixated on having his hair cut repeatedly, how he loved the smell of that first hairdresser’s shop and her body odor, how a single glimpse of her ample breasts through her uniform sent him into a state of euphoria, to the point of blurting out to his family at dinner that his life’s ambition was to marry a hairdresser.
And so he does. We learn Mathilde was one of three hairdressers at the shop previously owned by Ambroise Dupré (Maurice Chevit), an older gay man who hated cutting women’s hair but happily cut and shampooed men and children. When he decided to retire he simply turned the shop over to Mathilde, she being capable and charming in her quiet way. Her unlikely attraction to the much older Antoine is perhaps explained by his utter devotion and worshipful adoration. It doesn’t matter to her that he has no job, no other source of income, or that he spends day after day mostly watching her with loving, sometimes lustful eyes. His only other interest, seemingly, is dancing to Middle Eastern pop music. How Antoine made his way through life prior to meeting her is left to the viewer’s imagination.
There’s little in the way of plot. After they marry, occasionally other eccentric customers burst into the shop, like the mother of an unruly child badly in need of a haircut, or the bickering couple—angry, hostile wife, mousy husband that loves her nonetheless—but these are largely incidental to the thin but interesting premise. The picture is relatively short, just 81 minutes. Amusingly, director writer-director Leconte in an interview included on the disc admits his ideas don’t lend themselves to longer movies, and he wonders why other filmmakers let their movies ramble on for more than two hours.
This loving couple fall into the same class of rare movie characters as, say, Christine Lahti’s Aunt Sylvie in Bill Forsyth’s hypnotic Housekeeping (1987). Like that character, Antoine and Mathilde straddle the cusp of madness and enviable freedom. We sort of admire their “perfect love” but wonder the price of their reckless disregard for the “real world.” The film ends happily-yet-tragically, or maybe tragically-but-happily, open-ended in a way that begs way more questions than it tries to answer.
Kino’s Blu-ray, licensed from TFI, is presented in 1080p ‘scope at 2.39:1 widescreen. The image, restored in 4K from the original camera negative, looks great, and the DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 mono audio sounds good for what it is, and the optional English subtitles are good on this Region “A” encoded disc.
Supplements consist of recent interviews with Leconte and actress Galiena, and an audio commentary by film historian Adrian Martin.
The Hairdresser’s Husband is an odd but sometimes beguiling film, decidedly off-kilter but pleasant and intriguing, the kind of older art house-type picture that you’d see with friends and talk about enthusiastically over dinner afterwards. Recommended.
- Stuart Galbraith IV