Winner of five César Awards feels honest and tender without ever being patronizing
Comédie Française member Guillaume Gallienne’s Les garçons et Guillaume, à table! is a uniquely smart French dramatic comedy and the proud winner of five of this year’s César Awards, including Best Actor, Best Film, and Best Adapted Screenplay.
The bourgeois life of the effeminate Guillaume (Guillaume Gallienne) is far from easy: he’s not accepted by his two brothers, he’s largely ignored by his icy father (André Marcon), and is almost constantly disturbed and criticized by his narcissistic, dominant mother (Guillaume Gallienne again, in a mesmerizing performance).
Ever since he was a little kid, he has felt he’s a girl: he likes women’s clothes, gestures, behaviour and almost everything they do. He wishes he could dress like a woman, but his mother holds him back because his father won’t allow it. You’d think that Guillaume doesn’t like his family, but in fact he does. Above all, he adores his mother, who treats him like a girl. Not surprisingly, he wants and needs his mother to love him back more than anything else.
Such a set-up in a story about queers and their families is pretty common, so far there’s nothing new. Considering Les garçons et Guillaume, à table! is a dramatic comedy, then the use of stereotypes and clichés is deliberate and legitimate. For the most part, they are recycled in different contexts: Guillaume being bullied at his boarding school, Guillaume treated by a series of ruthless psychoanalysts for his phobias and melancholy, Guillaume falling in unrequited love, Guillaume dancing Sevillanas, etc.
Though the timing is successful, and the dialogue is well-written and witty, not all the episodic skits are effective or amusing. Sometimes the performances go over the board, even for the histrionic nature of the film. That being said, it’s equally true that when things do work — which is most of the time — they can’t possibly get any better. But what’s most important is that the film always feels honest and tender without ever being patronizing.
So after Les garçons et Guillaume, à table! carefully goes over the established clichés on a funny note — plainly hilarious at times — and delivers more than a handful of emphatic dramatic scenes, it begins to show there’s more under the ostensibly formulaic façade while it leads viewers into a big surprise.
This is when you truly apprehend what the filmmaker wants to convey and share.
Suffice it to say that one of the ideas — if not the main one — is to determine how society at large, including microcosms such as families, has an enormous pull in shaping who you are, what you should desire, and how you should feel. That’s precisely what Guillaume ends up learning after a tour de force which begins with a live premiere of a monologue play he’s written. Which is, in fact, the fictionalized real life story of Guillaume Gallienne.
