Dry Cleaning

The mellow, mesmerising tune of the theme music by Edouard Dubois made me watch this movie twice while on a transcontinental flight. The music was only one reason among others that made me watch the film twice in four hours. I am a French film enthusiast and the contents of the film (latent homosexuality, guilt, cross dressing, etc.)were not out of the ordinary. What was striking in the film was the deliberate, structured screenplay that made me recall early works of Marcel Carne. I was not surprised to learn that the screenplay won an award at the prestigious Venice Film Festival and nominated for a Cesar in France.

The film's beginning and end revolve around affirmation of marital bonds, while the bulk of the film (to me only the sub-plot) ventures into transgression of those bonds followed by redemption. There is sadness at the end but it also accompanied by a silent studied reaffirmation of faith between man and wife. The final walk of the duo is an ordinary event yet captured powerfully in this film. I recommend this film to those who have not seen it not as a film that is extraordinary, but one which encourages viewers to introspect and look at ordinary lives, not of superheroes but of less than perfect men and women. The film succeeds because of low-keyed acting (Merhar and Miou-Miou), the sombre yet mesmerising music and good mise-en-scene. The film discusses "drycleaning" of two individuals' marital life, but the script and the director elevate the wife as strong personality with a level-headed strength developed quite unobtrusively as the film progresses. Anne Fontaine, the director, is someone to watch out for in the future as is Edouard Dubois. In more ways than one (direction, cinematography, the script) the film gives a woman's perspective of the story, though a wee bit sombre.

Recently i watched some or many french movies about husband n wife relationship. i really dont understand or what i understand that what the hek is going on with french people? . or maybe its just movies. as movies represent its people too.

A movie about married couple with 2 kids and BOTH very busy with their dry cleaning business. seems normal till they enjoyed much in EXOTIC club. and then another young stud character came in their lives + home. which turns everything upside.

----------------------spoilers----------------------

the thing i dont understand is , a normal French married couple SUDDENLY invite a GIGLO to their business + home + lives after soo many years of marriage. even that young giglo has its own intentions to that couple after being dumped by his own gf. even a husband knows from a start that he WANTS and is getting into his wife pants but still OK with it ? . and that french wife? . she didnt think about her own children n family and suddenly want to leave everything for that guy. that is kinda too much.

never ever invite a horny young guy into home where a bored housewife is already on heat.

Saw a humongously uninspired French movie, Dry Cleaning (Nettoyage a Sec), that the advertisers swear won Cesar awards all over the place, but is just a hodgepodge of every foreign movie cliche that might strike an upscale audience as profound: a sexually ambiguous stranger insinuates himself into the lives of a married couple, engaging them in sexual games that bring them to the brink of self-destruction. She's desolate without the young man; the husband wrestles with his denial that he's also turned on by the stranger. Of course this is "art theatre," so we are to suppose that every straight man is really a gay man who hasn't found out yet. On the other hand the homosexual aspect of the story becomes the vehicle that carries the husband into his own corner of hell, an idea that seemed arty thirty-odd years ago (The Sergeant; The Children's Hour) but now is just insulting to gays. And of course the story is dotted with major and minor sexual interludes and taunts, but relationships are left to angry, dissatisfying silences between not-particularly-interesting characters. Story elements are offered that suggest the plot could go somewhere else but instead lead nowhere (the young man's sister leaves and conceivably might return looking for him; the young man has genuine talent as a dry-cleaner and might make a life for himself beyond his "drifter" existence; the married couple thinks about moving to Canada). I think the filmmaker has a long way to go in justifying why he wanted to make this movie -- what he thought would make this film extraordinary compared to some other story about dissolving marriage or sexual curiosity. Imagine La Strada if Anthony Quinn just sat around and brooded. If Thomas Mann had written Dry Cleaning it would be called Death in Suburbia: except that, speaking strictly for myself, I think it's the audience that dies.

In a small town in France, Nicole Kunstler (Miou-Miou) and her husband Jean-Marie Kunstler is a traditional French middle-class couple, bored with their years of marriage and running a small business of cleaning and ironing clothes with some financial difficulties. When they meet the bisexual Loic (Stanislas Merhar) working as drag in a night-club with his sister Marylin (Mathilde Seigner), the sexually dissatisfied Nicole feels a great sexual attraction for him. The couple brings the young man to live and work with them, in a weird relationship, and Nicole has an affair with Loic and becomes a happy person. This intriguing triangle of love has a tragic end. "Nettoyage à Sec" is almost an excellent romance. The screenplay begins very daring, but the solution for the love situation is very moralist and resolved in a tragic, but easy way. The cast has a great performance and the direction is very good, but the story deserved a better conclusion. My vote is seven.

Title (Brazil): "Lavagem a Seco" ("Dry Cleaning")

Sad, melancholic, nostalgic and soft.

A film about illusions and impossibility of escape. Description of failure and ambiguous expectation. French flavor and marks from Pasolini, empty universes and slices of love, game without innocence and failure of dreams.

A world, a small world where the work is only real refuge. Where the memories or the projects are shadows of a lost time and a bovaric certitude.

Delicate and tender, subtle and innocent, this film is a pledge for discover the sense of existence. The image of war with the other or with yourself, the fear like basic answer to the movement of time, the questions like skin of interior fog, the presence of temptation in the person of an androgynous teenager, the looks, deceptions or infidelity are elements of ordinary life. For everyone, "The Queens of Night" are key to a second chance, to a form of happiness. But always, the happiness is puzzle of illusions and the old rules are more strong that any form of seduction. In final, the corpse of a gorgeous dream like only "souvenir" of a perverse form of normality.