over the moon
by
Douglas Messerli
Jacques
Demy (writer and director) L'Événement
le plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la Lune (A Slightly Pregnant Man) / 1973
Perhaps
one of the strangest comedies ever committed to film, Jacques Demy’s
L'Événement le
plus important depuis que l'homme a marché sur la Lune (A Slightly Pregnant Man) stars Marcello
Mastroianni as an increasingly pregnant man and Catherine Deneuve as his
hairdresser wife.
A similar “joke” was made in Rock
Hudson’s role in the 1959 film, Pillow
Talk; but there it was only a conceit, dreamed up by the writers perhaps
just to tease those in the know about Hudson’s sexuality. Hudson simply ducks into the gynecologist’s
office to hide out from Doris Day, which intrigues both nurse and doctor. But
here, Demy, a gay man (married to fellow director, Agnès Varda) takes it all
the way, as the doctor determines his character’s pregnancy is the result of
eating too much hormone-fed chicken, and Mastrioianni shares the
information with his
wife and friends—who greet the fact with surprising equanimity—soon after
serving as an national spokesman for a clothes designer determined to create a
maternity wardrobe for men.
Several men even appear envious of his
experience, and soon males from all over the world are reporting similar
conditions.* One artist, a friend of a woman acquaintance, admits he has always
wanted to have a baby. And the women joke that from now on they will all be
better understood by their companions.
Like Demy’s previous movies, all of this
fantasy is drolly handed out with bright colors and an occasional song. But as
several critics have pointed out, since there is no tension between any of the
characters, the “specialness” of the event is drained from the narrative, and
we are allowed little delight in what otherwise might make for a series of
charged statements either in defense or opposition to male birthing.
In
the days of French second-wave feminism and early gay liberation, and before
gays could marry or adopt children, one can imagine that Demy dreamt up this
fable to order to talk about his own desires for a male-centered domestic life.
His and Varda’s own son, Mathieu, was born the year before he made this movie.
Yet, predictably, the movie can only
disappoint, as Mazetti is finally told that his pregnancy has been only an
hysterical one. And we remember that no man, not even on the moon, can have a
baby by himself.
*Billy
Crystal underwent a similar trauma in the movie Rabbit Test.
Los Angeles,
November 10, 2016
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