User Reviews

Spoilers...

"Dry cleaning", that's what the title of this Anne Fontaine's effort means in English and it's a well-appropriated one to qualify the contents of the story she tells the audience. Its bulk essentially occurs in a dry-cleaner whose purpose is to clean the customers' clothes but the director prefers to soil her couple's clear conscience as well as their moral, sexual conventions.

Could this film be a crossing between Claude Chabrol's universe and Pier Paolo Pasolini's film "Theorema" (1968)? It's highly possible and they're respectable credentials for this novel, idiosyncratic film. The first one for the provincial backdrop and a dash of gastronomy. The author of "le Boucher" (1970) and "les Noces Rouges" (1973) excelled when it came to depict vignettes of provincial life, in the Kunstler's shop and apartment but also in the town itself. Anne Fontaine just has to describe with just a few features, the gloomy aura which reigns in Belfort. And the second reference for of course the story of the film which bears a strong resemblance with Pasolini's opus: both introduced a young man who subverted a comfortable universe and caused damage in them. "Nettoyage à Sec" could be an updated version of "Theorema".

Loïc is the disruptive element in the Kunstler's "petit bourgeois" world. More than this, he's the catalyst of their buried desires and passions. Before making their dreary universe with its constricting etiquette falter in the dry-cleaner's, he will at first indirectly galvanize them to accomplish their desires. The week-end in Bâle, unusual in the couple' life is a proof of it. Before this, one of the key sequences is the one when the four protagonists are together in the hotel room because in this moment, the persona of Jean Marie and especially Nicole is well construed and defined. It's necessary to steer well the evolution and crucial steps of the story. Nicole makes love with Loïc and it's a sign that she's tired of her life and is ready to go in a new direction. Later, Fontaine will intersperse her film with conspicuous signs which don't fool anyone. See the scene in the restaurant: she confesses to her husband that she doesn't feel courageous enough to carry on her nine-to-five life in the dry-cleaner's. She's on the verge of packing in. Jean-Marie's answer is meaningful: "however when we started, you wanted to be the first one to help me to settle here...". So, it seems perfectly logical that later she accepts Loïc's advances. As for Jean-Marie, he appears hesitant and undetermined but maybe would he like (unconsciously or not) change his life in spite of an eloquent sequence: when he takes Loïc downstairs to show him concrete memories of his first years spent in the shop. Memories to which he is deeply attached...

Loïc's demeanor is rather elusive and it's hard to decipher his mainspring. Is it because he lost his closest human being in the world (Marilyn) that he settles to Nicole and Jean-Marie? Is he sick of his nomad life despite what he says to the couple? By enticing the couple, does he try to fulfill an affective gap in his life? It was shrewd from Fontaine to make opaque his motivations. Thus, he keeps all his mystery. It was also clever from the director to have chosen evocative colors for her film and she's got a sense of light. The white of the dry-cleaner's sharply contrasts with the half-murky, dimly light rooms in the apartment, especially when Loïc is in these rooms. This to underscore that the life of the couple with Loïc's intrusion goes bit by bit unravel. She also has the gift to build her film on a relentless crescendo and to shroud it with an increasingly latent, ominous tension. A tension caused by several factors: disquieting moments or lines pronounced by Loïc, by the contrast between the appearance the couple gives to the customers and employees and what lies beneath this when they are in the apartment with Loïc, especially when the latter finds himself with Nicole. And it won't take long for Jean Marie to discover their love affair. But also with Jean-Marie's tantrums he has to try to resist to the strange attraction he feels for Loïc. His short wild mood swings are the result of a sexual repression he vainly wants to conceal. Loïc will feel it very well in the inevitable sequence in which he will try to sodomize him (a violent one which packs a real wallop). After this scene, one could argue that the couple came back to where they started but in worse: Nicole and Jean-Marie are destroyed.

The acting is uniformly good and largely lives up to the demands of the scenario. The type of character of each actor of the quartet complements one another. Although the film really put Mathilde Seigner on the map, it's her coy, brazen partner Stanislas Mehrer who gets the lion's share. I don't put Charles Berling and Miou-Miou in my straitjacket of favorite French actors but here, I was very taken with their acting.

"Nettoyage à Sec" has a taut, well-constructed scenario in which every step of the story rings true. It's an unsettling piece of work which leaves indelible stains. It may also walk a fine line with works like "Harry: Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien" (2000) by Dominik Moll which could be his little brother. I would like to discover Anne Fontaine's anterior and subsequent works to her 1997 film.

Nettoyage a sec (Dry Cleaning) : a good choice of film title for starters. The initial image created by such a title is one of cleanliness, order and routine. In light of the closing scene though, a double-entendre can be detected : Nicole and Jean-Marie will certainly have their work cut out for them cleaning blood from their clothes and from their hands ...

The well-paced plot allows for good character development, and Berhing, Miou-Miou and Merhar do it fantastically.

The middle-aged couple, who have reached a stagnated period in their relationship, seek new direction. Nicole is bored and uninspired, she wants a change from the monotony of running the shop. Jean-Marie is "a very uptight man" according to Marilyn, Loic's sister. His homosexual awakening is a great personal struggle for him, his self-doubt beginning in the hotel scene when Loic is so rude to him.

The couple's major flaw is an inability for their own introspection and thus for the damage they can cause. The repercussions of their ignorance become dangerous because they allow themselves "to be driven, not necessarily by a fault of their own, to a point of no return" (-Anne Fontaine, director).

From the moment that Loic and Marilyn meet Nicole and Jean-Marie, they take full advantage of the latter's uncertainty, both materially and sexually. Loic is not an evil spirit who planned all along to sew disorder. He is an intuitive and laid-back character whose pitiful situation - no family background and therefore no direction in his life - lead him to great negativity, and on the surface he presents a cold and uncaring personality. He is independent and self-centred because, apart from his sister, whom he protects aggressively, he has never had to look after anyone but himself.

In terms of the film's characterisation, the only real fault i noticed was an absence of relationship between Nicole and her son Pierre. They share only one affectionate exchange throughout the whole film; the boy's role has little (if any) importance at all.

The final shot of the film : having disposed of Loic in the laundry shoot, we see the couple walking together into the dusk. For the first time, Jean-Marie has an apparent expression of liberation on his face. If their relationship with Loic has brought them closer as a couple, we could conclude that their uncontrolled downward slide into such a dark, frightening world was not altogether futile.

(WARNING - CONTAINS MILD SPOILER) The somewhat unresolved nature of the very last scene is ultimately dissatisfying, leaving a feeling that the film may have been inherently overly familiar - a chronicle of a straight- laced, unsatisfied couple who taste forbidden fruit and are almost ruined by it. The film's air of calm scrutiny is generally engrossing though, as it sketches the quiet disappointments and compromises of rural small business; a life caught up by routine, where years go by without a vacation. The plot initially finds the couple fascinated by sheer difference, leaving an enjoyable ambiguity as to whether there's any real sexual attraction on Berling's part toward Merhar, or whether it's largely a matter of intertwined ego, loneliness, and a symbolic yielding to the limitations of his life (the sexual encounter here looks like a pure power play). But the film's restraint makes it easy to take for the most part as a low-key, well-observed black comedy, thriving on the contrast between the ultra-orderly dry cleaning business and the flashy excess of the cross-dressing scene.

It's impossible - for me at least - to know whether or not Ann Fontaine was familiar with Joe Orton's sixties play Entertaining Mister Sloane (subsequently filmed)before writing and directing Nettoyage a sec some thirty years later but it is reasonable to assume that the central premise - bi-sexual catalyst male enters and ultimately disrupts household via sexual encounters with both male and female - is very similar with, in the case of the latter, a Gallic twist. Orton's protagonist disrupted a home occupied by a brother and sister both childless whilst Fontaine's shares a home with a married couple who have a child. There are, of course, other substantial differences, where Mr Sloane came, as it were, out of nowhere, Loic (Stanislas Merhar) is first encountered by Nicole (Miou-Miou) and Jean-Marie (Charles Berning) Kunstler in a club where he is performing a cross-dressing act with his sister Marilyn (Mathilde Seigner)and only goes to live with the Kunstlers some time later when Marilyn leaves both him and the act in favour of life with her boy friend. The Kunstlers have been married for some fifteen years and it may be said that the marriage has become as 'dry' as the dry cleaning business they own and is in need of sexual 'cleaning'. If so they came to the right place for the amoral Loic is happy to oblige, first by seducing Nicole - not terribly difficult as she was ripe for seduction - and then, with less success, Jean-Marie. What we have here is a fine, tightly written and directed script acted to perfection by the three principals and arguably the finest of Fontaines early films - Berning would later appear in her How I Killed My Father. Very definitely worth seeing.