Alexis Langlois : “Youtubers are the storytellers of modern times”
Eleven years ago, perhaps to the day if a few date fanatics care to check, Yann Gonzalez’s You and the Night was presented at the Critics’ Week. The promise of a new queer cinema in France, set in the exact same place as Alexis Langlois’ Queens of Drama – the most exposed screening of the week (the first weekend’s event), but strangely out of competition. It was as if some first-time filmmakers had already achieved such triumphant careers in short films that they were denied the opportunity to compete on an equal footing with other firsts, which they risked crushing. This was the case with You and the Night, as it is today with the Queens, strangely destined not to reign except for the Caméra d’or and the Queer Palm, for which they are in fact more than eligible. In truth, their glitter should just as easily go uncrowned.
From the thwarted loves of Mimi Madamour, a sugary-sweet, 2000s-savvy TV pop star born from the pigtails of Britney, Lorie and Alizée; and Billie Kohler, a punk and feminist free spirit with underground inspirations reminiscent of Sexy Sushi, we’d be tempted to start by noting the feverish pastiche dimension of the film. Queens takes an exhilarating look at forty years of music, ranging from the top of the charts to the hidden gems, from candy-pink pop to tearful new wave to queerpunk fireworks, and Langlois has rewritten a chiseled history of hits as fictitious as they are familiar, like a ghostly iteration of our own auditory memory constructed by a gang of female composers as heterogeneous as Yelle, Rebeka Warrior and Mona Soyoc. It could just as easily be seen as a meta-commentary – through these two archetypal incarnations, the film recounts the conjugal intertwining of the mainstream and the underground, their unstable alchemy of effusion, seduction, codependency and rejection, and ends up blurring the lines by reversing positions, celebrating the muted rebellions of commercial music’s unloved icons – quoting Britney’s calvary at length – while gently sneering at the conventional provocation of subversive successes, not necessarily less formatted than the mainstream ones.
A flamboyant and highly acclaimed short-film career
But before being all that, the film is first and foremost a matter of melodrama and romantic breath – which is its real surprise, while we were expecting it to be excessive, outrageous and formally intoxicating, without being sure neither of the power of its narrative nor of its staying power over a long period of time. Over the course of their flamboyant and highly acclaimed short-film career, Langlois has produced an ethnography of queer afterparties (Trinkets And Dark Thoughts), a musical comedy with a teen-movie twist (Your Young Years Will Dry Your Tears)), a trans revenge movie (Terror, Sisters!), a horrific, Buffy-esque satire of French cinema budgeting (The Demons of Dorothy); in short, they’ve produced novelties, formal and thematic happenings, fiery attacks, powerfully mastered gestures (from Trinkets And Dark Thoughts onwards, their acute sense of framing is striking) but executed on the energy of a single impulse, like a drive, of life, or death, or sex.
In the trial by fire of the transition to a style of writing capable of sustaining almost two hours of storytelling, on which so many hopes for short films have crashed before, the film holds up. « I immediately thought that this was where it was all going to play out, that we had to be swept up in a narrative. » Inspired by a real-life love affair in which their role was that of the trashy activist, and in which the identity of the mainstream star would remain a mystery despite our very rude insistence, Langlois above all put a lot of their love for cinema into the structure of their story, borrowing “from De Palma-style rise and fall”, but also to the great Hollywood memoirs such as Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful or Cukor’s A Star Is Born – “even if some young cinephiles reject a certain classical cinema, it’s with this cinema, this lyrical staging and its outrageous female characters like those of Bette Davis, Liz Taylor or Judy Holliday, that my queer and feminist outlook was built.”
There are two surprising motifs in Queens that are almost enough to give the film its unsuspected scope. First, the orchestral score by Pierre Desprats, completely unexpected for such a film and assuming high altitudes of baroque tragedy evoking Morricone (Once Upon a Time in America) or directly quoting Herrmann (Vertigo). Then there’s the care taken with the operatic choreography, in several key sequences where the camera navigates with extreme grace among a dance of figures and silhouettes, as in the casting scene for the budding starlets or the final stroll through the cabaret. These are real puzzles of elegantly concealed sophistication, the idea not being to show off, but to keep the film in perpetual motion, even if this means formal inflation on the borderline of what is feasible. Shot in five weeks with a single camera in Brussels studios, Queens is a miracle of its own making. Langlois was undaunted by the challenge: “They’re self-taught, but a real technician, thanks to their extensive experience in short films, » notes their cinematographer Marine Atlan. “They also edits their own films, in collaboration with Gabriel Gonzalez. All conversations with them were technically accomplished and coherent, they’re not a filmmaker with abstract views who deflects onto their technicians.”
Youtubers are the storytellers of modern times
A third motif serves as the film’s backbone, developing both its grip on pop culture and its hue of Proustian, memory-imbued melancholy: it’s that of the Youtuber who narrates, from the distant future, a romance that sometimes seems to be aimed at an extinct humanity, or at the extraterrestrials who might one day discover its remains on a desolate Earth. As an end-of-times Tiktok-star and Mimi fan disappointed by her scandalous love affairs, Steevyshady tells the story as much as he gradually assumes power within it – the fan replaces the star in the spotlight, in a Warhol-like shift subtly retraced in the final act. “Youtubers are the storytellers of modern times”, professes Langlois, who obviously drew their inspiration from the Arabian Nights, or more precisely from a less noble intermediary – the narrator of Disney’s Aladdin – to build this driving character, brilliantly interpreted by Bilal Hassani in a cartoonish variation on himself. “I discovered him in the shocking video of his coming out, and I really wanted to write this role for him,” recalls the filmmaker, who in the meantime has also signed one of his music videos (Marathon, a highly erotic piece with François Sagat).
For the first time since Langlois and their troops’ debut in 2016, the headlining role is no longer held by the group assembled over these eight years and four short films: Nana Benamer, Raya Martigny, Dustin Muchuvitz, Naëlle Dariya, Justine Langlois (the filmmaker’s sister and long-time accomplice, who turned down the role of Billie for fear of a long-term commitment incompatible with her life as a firefighter in the Cévennes region). Most of the gang are nonetheless to be found in the supporting roles of this first feature, which hands over the lead role to a brand-new couple. Director and actor Gio Ventura, seen notably in a short by Yann Gonzalez (Fou de Bassan), dreamed of becoming part of Langlois’s cinema, and approached them directly at Locarno 2021: the role of Billie Kohler lent itself perfectly to his little boxer’s face and body. The discovery of Mimi Madamour, meanwhile, obviously proceeded from a script à la Vicki Lester, main protagonist of A Star Is Born : a grueling casting process was necessary to locate Louiza Aura, a young film student aspiring to a career as a screenwriter and director who swears by Chris Marker, Taiwanese and Korean cinema, and whom the film constantly transforms from timid starry-eyed girl to pop diva, unto the very edge of disgrace, emancipation and old age. Five auditions were necessary to confirm the choice and, above all, to ensure the chemistry between the two performers, paradoxically tested on their break-up scene. Seven months of rehearsals finally preceded the shoot, which for many already had an air of greatness about it: “Every night I’d tell Louiza that it was crazy, that we’d definitely be at Cannes!”, recalls Gio.
Financed by a rather improbable advance on receipts for the romantic comedy directed by Arielle Dombasle, Queens arrives at the end of a cycle embodied by an array of filmmakers with whom it shares many aspirations and several partners (Desprats with Mandico, Ventura with Gonzalez, Atlan with Poggi and Vinel…). Nonetheless, it may well open up a whole new world of its own. Through its humor, in particular, the film breaks away from the lyricism of its predecessors, and shuns a certain poetic register associated with queer cinema in recent years, bringing it back into the camp that has always been Langlois’s and is John Waters’s, too: the camp of euphoria and fury.