Cleaning Movie Reviews

I love seeing a behind the scenes look at how Music Videos and films were made and I enjoyed watching this on the DVD. It's always interesting to see a Music Video being made.

It all started when Writer Paul Curran wrote an angry poem about a man with a hateful past re-lives terrible pain but tries to look forward. A year later it became the perfect template for an Eminem song. Many writers re-wrote it to make it specificly about Eminem's childhood. Even Eminem had input into the song and the video.

This film is a wonderful, intriguing character study that completely falls apart in its reprehensible last five minutes. The majority of the film explores the variety of longings people possess, and how they manage expressing-- or repressing-- these longings. Two couples are contrasted in lifestyle, but the film gradually and creatively shows how the two pairs are less different than might seem apparent at first glance. The ways the couples interact makes for interesting viewing, and for this reason would warrant a four-star rating.

Tragically, the filmmaker seems to want her cake and eat it too. The story is not content to chart divided and varied longings-- it disguises itself as a progressive look at erotic behavior (if it can be considered progressive to show non-conformist sexual relationships after at least 40 years of such depictions on film). But ultimately it becomes clear that what the director really wants is to titillate with scenes that might be considered illicit to the bourgeois audience members and then reassure the conservatives that such illicit behavior will not go without punishment. Haven't we gotten past such stilted conventions and pandering to narrow-mindedness? This proves to be a fatal misjudgment in an otherwise interesting movie.

A very raw movie on the powerful role in people's lives of emotional dependencies on others, on how those dependencies develop and on how these higher in a relationship hierarchy exploit the dependencies for manipulation. The drama of the dependencies is underscored with sex and murder. The movie brings to mind Shakespearean plays such as Hamlet or better Titus Andronicus (no, not in the Julie Taymor edition). I actually ran across this movie in France.

To me, a romantically inclined gay man, this was a fascinating but ultimately unfulfilling tale of a "normal" French couple, Nicole and Jean-Marie Kunstler, who have grown unsatisfied with their settled, routine lives. The couple runs a dry cleaning business in an unexciting small French town. Their lives change when they go to a bar with some business associates and encounter Loïc and Marylin, a cross dressing brother/sister act. From the first, the couple is fascinated with the pair but particularly with Loïc, the sexually ambiguous brother, (played to perfection by Stanislas Merhar).

The couple is so enchanted with the pair that they take a weekend to the city where the performers are appearing next. When the sister decides to end the act and run away with her lover, the brother insinuates himself into our dry-cleaning couple's lives. The young man claims to be, and is by all indications, straight and soon takes the wife as a lover. The husband is also aroused by the boy but denies his attraction. Soon the boy is living in the couple's home and working in the Dry Cleaning shop and is showing a talent for that type of work. He even befriends the couple's child and helps him with homework and takes him skating.

Whether his good work arises from Loïc's desire to repay Jean-Marie or from some innate talent for dry cleaning is unclear. I think that Loïc feels guilty about cuckolding this man who has shown him nothing but kindness, genuinely likes the guy, and is aware of the man's attraction to him. He wants to make amends in any way that he can. Ultimately Loïc offers himself to Jean-Marie physically but is rebuffed.

Whether it's the husband's "homosexual panic" or his actually seeing his wife with Loïc during one of their trysts, Jean-Marie decides that Loïc must go. This leads to the final and I think dissappointing concluding scenes.