I liked the title, All for one, and the idea of making the three musketeers women offered the hope of washing my head of the dusty Three Musketeers released last year. I even took the risk of dragging Dora into it, who also reacted well to the title. It’s a film by Houda Benyamina which caused a sensation with its Divinein 2016, a small band of young people from the cities, wanting to free themselves from the domination of guys, and first by earning money, by the simplest, most dangerous and most amoral of ways, drug trafficking. drug. Having clit, that was their credo. Result, a nice, very violent film, which caused controversy (it still existed at the time), and a success.
Nine years later, with a budget multiplied by five, Houda Benyamina achieves with the same talent, the same energy, the palinody of the previous one. Indeed, by sending her four heroines to the middle of the 17th century, including two of the former Divinethe beautiful Oulaya Amamra and the phenomenal Déborah Lukumuena, Daphné Patakia and Sabrina Ouazani completing the quartet of musketeers freed from everything and Alexandre Dumas, Benyamina realizes the palinody of her Divine.
It is no longer by having the clit that they free themselves, impose themselves, take power, it is by sticking mustaches on themselves and attaching artificial rods between their legs. In other words, they renounce their sex, where they claimed it. An attempt similarly doomed to failure, what was a drama becomes a comedy. The message that stifled the first film is lightened, almost mocked in the second, advantageously replaced by the simple pleasure of making cinema. This is undoubtedly what is called becoming an adult. Or professional.
In 1937, Christian-Jaque had sent Fernandel to the court of François I with, as viaticum, a Petit Larousse which would serve as a divinatory vade mecum for all the great people of the time, starting with the King of France. There is a bit of that in Houda Benyamina’s film: in wanting to save the queen (we wonder why), her musketeers risk ending up at the stake after the usual ordeals, like Fernandel subjected to the rasping tongue of a goat licking the soles of his feet coated with salt. We had to find such a memorable scene. All things being equal, it was filmed inside the car of a couple of aristocrats that our musketeers took hostage. We learn how to make men cry. The feminist claim is accomplished in the hilarity of this torture session, it may seem like a small thing, and it is precisely because it is a small thing that it hits home and hard.
Delicious thrill of equivocation
Later, Georgina Amoros and Nemo Schiffman, as a royal couple, offer a most delightful sexual act. It is in fact a consensual rape (on the part of the king) by a queen eager to get pregnant. The reversal of roles at the highest summit of the State, as degree zero of women’s emancipation… why not. If it results in a moment as funny as that, I’ll take it. And I’ll take it again if it can spare us the so-called love scenes devoid of meaning, humor and creativity that we routinely find in the cinema.
Coming out of the screening, a lady screamed that at 70 years old, she had just seen the worst film of her life. “Oh well, why?” Dora asked him. And the 70-year-old lady clarified: “Positive discrimination to this degree is despicable!”
For my part, it had been twenty years since I last heard of “positive discrimination”. Well ! If this film wants to cause a scandal, let it do so.
Women with mustaches, men with tits, the entire film is shot through with the delicious thrill of equivocation. Until the unexpected Kacey Mottet-Klein as Cardinal Richelieu, who transgresses much better than in A violent world which comes out next week, a thriller where all sexes are in the right place.
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