The Liberating Power of Laughter: Le Placard and Gazon maudit

"La comédie permet l'utopie."

—Josiane Balasko

"Men may dyen of ymaginacioun, So depe may impressioun be take." (One can die of imagination, so deeply may a mental image be taken.)

—Geoffrey Chaucer ("The Miller's Tale")

An old aphorism asserts that feminism is the only movement for social justice that is still considered a joke. When feminism itself uses humor, however, it has the potential to expose and even to change ideas that the dominant gender system generally tries to keep hidden.

French/Sex/Comedy

In Le Placard (2001, written and directed by Francis Veber), an accountant in a condom factory overhears that he is about to lose his job and pretends to be homosexual, making it politically incorrect for his boss to carry out his downsizing plan. In Gazon maudit (1995, written and directed by Josiane Balasko), a lonely housewife embarks on an amorous adventure with another woman, throwing her family into turmoil. Both comedies were fabulously successful with a broad, mainstream public. Gazon maudit attracted almost four million spectators (3,981,774) throughout France during its forty-six weeks of exclusivité. Le Placard proved even more popular: it sold a million tickets in the five days following its release, and by the end of its seventeen weeks of exclusivité, over five million people (5,316,614) had seen the film in 565 French movie theaters. The Nouvel Observateur celebrated its "rire libérateur," and Le Temps jubilated that Le Placard helped French cinema gain market share ascendancy over Hollywood. ¹

Although both films addressed a middle-class, heterosexual audience (Le Placard was even charged with being "ultrabourgeois" ² ), both also drew crowds of openly homosexual spectators in France. In the United States, Le Placard became the second most popular French film after Le Fabuleux Destin d'Amélie Poulain, released the same year. Le Placard was praised by the Gay and Lesbian Review (U.S.) for raising issues "extremely important for employees, gay or straight" and for showing how "those in the closet may do a disservice to themselves and others." ³ Le Placard was nominated by the Political Film Society (U.S.) as best film of 2001 in the category of human rights.

The popularity of both films depended, too, on their casting, which brought together beloved actors from the cinema with others drawn from the café-théâtre tradition. Le Placard stars Daniel Auteuil and Gérard Depardieu and also features Michel Aumont, Jean Rochefort, Thierry Lhermite, and Michèle Laroque. Appearing in Gazon maudit are Alain Chabat, Balasko herself, and Victoria Abril, best known for her roles in films by Pedro Almodóvar. The heritage of the café-théâtre (through Lhermite and Balasko) places both films in a post-1968 comic lineage that is socially engaged, provocative, somewhat anarchist, and often feminist. As one scholar put it, "le public du café-théâtre est pour la plupart composé de gens jeunes et friands non seulement de nouveaux types de spectacles mais aussi et surtout d'un nouveau type de rapports humains." ⁴

What interests me here is not so much that these two popular comedies are about sex, but that they are also about politics, and, in particular, about sexual politics. Specifically, both films scrutinize and challenge the dominant structure of power relations that Adrienne Rich was first to call "compulsory heterosexuality." ⁵ It is not coincidental that a wedding photo is mistreated in one film and dismembered in the other. Nor should we find it surprising that, in both films, feminist and anti-homophobic goals are inextricably interwoven. Moreover, not only do these films provide a glimpse of utopian alternatives, they also reveal the ways in which our strictly enforced system of gender norms functions as a broad worldview and even an epistemology.

Theorists of gender on both sides of the Atlantic have argued since the early 1970s that heterosexuality is a—perhaps even the—fundamental conceptual opposition that structures meaning. Male/female and masculine/feminine binaries organize and render intelligible a semantic field that includes numerous other oppositions, such as light/dark, good/bad...