What’s this?  A lyrical French romance with themes of sexual awakening and a non-linear storyline?  Positively shocking!

While there are abundant familiar visual tropes and filmmaking techniques that pervade The Hairdresser’s Husband (warm and overexposed lighting, quirky characters, a fanciful narrative, etc.), they are all simply done well.  The entire film may be well-trodden territory, but it’s a comfortable kind of familiar rather than a tiresome one.  Every frame is bathed in a kind of idealized nostalgia for a France that only ever existed in movies of this sort.

The plot itself is sort of unimportant, as it is merely a vehicle for introducing the film’s themes and quirky characters, as well as for filming lustful shots of women’s breasts.  Note: though there is no outright nakedness in The Hairdresser’s Husband, if you are a fan of the fabled “side boob,” then you will probably be a fan of this movie.  Anyway, the story begins with Antoine, a middle-aged man, narrating over scenes explaining his childhood obsession with hairdressers.  These early scenes turn something mundane, like getting a haircut, into a true act of intimacy.  In the eyes of the main character, the ritual of shampooing, the running of fingers through the hair, etc. becomes a sensual massage and establishes the origin for what will become Antoine’s obsession: marrying a hairdresser (as the title suggests). 

What makes the peculiar and possibly awkward sexual nature of the scenes featuring the child Antoine (such as a buxom hairdresser sensuously massaging the scalp of a twelve-year old) relaxing to watch instead of uncomfortable is the soothing, gentle recounting of events provided by lead actor Jean Rochefort, who plays the adult Antoine.  While many film narrations with such pervasiveness can become tedious, this one manages to act as a comforting through line within the film thanks to the ability of the actor to manipulate the French language into something hypnotic.

When Antoine reaches adulthood, he engages in a courtship that lasts about 6.8 seconds with the woman who will become his wife and they proceed to enjoy a variety of provocative sexual encounters.  It is nice to see an actual married couple consumed by their lust for one another, instead of being portrayed as bored or adulterous or abusive or dysfunctional or whatever else one sees in trite movies about married people.  Why should couples who just met get to experience all the aching desire?  Why not married ones as well?  Antoine gazes upon his wife Mathilde, played with subtle sensuality by the luminous Anna Galiena, with eyes that speak of profound love, sexual longing, and, most humorously, a sense of ultimate victory in achieving his fantasy.  Their marriage is one of slight changes in breathe and knowing glances, with pages of dialogue replaced by a single shift in facial expression.  It is both a testament to the talent of the actors and the wisdom of director Patrice Leconte that the proceedings are made so simple, as it adds to the fairytale-type narrative already present throughout.

Occasionally, the quirkiness of the film and its characters does get into the way of the movie itself.  From a man with an absurdly fake-looking Amish beard to a feral wolf child, several customers seeking hair care from Mathilde enter the film for apparent attempts at pleasurable silliness.  Efforts to show the main characters’ love for one another sometimes involve these outside characters, which results in moments more awkward than affectionate.  Showing Antoine, for example, getting to second base while Mathilde shampoos the hair of another man is a little off-putting.

Ultimately, the movie is more theme given form than a story driven by characters or plot, like an exercise in filmmaking techniques rather than a coherent whole.  This is most distinctly felt during the ending, which may have a sort of thematic consistency, but still feels blatantly manipulative and out of place, as if the whole film was reverse engineered in order to accommodate the final minutes.  This makes the last scenes jarring and emotionally incongruous, even if the pieces fit together on an intellectual level.  Honestly though, the last thing one wants from an ephemeral French meditation on love is an intellectual truth over an emotional one.