It’s not exactly a novel idea that many young queer people idealize pop divas to the point of over-identification, and it’s equally well-established culturally that the glossy fantasy of pop stardom often masks darker realities. It’s to the detriment of Queens of Drama, a 2000s-set French musical about the tormented love story between a rising pop star and her punk girlfriend, that director Alexis Langlois makes both of these well-worn concepts his key thematic tenets. The film is admirably ambitious, particularly in its brash aesthetic approach, yet Langlois’ failure to provoke any new insights about pop stardom, queer fandom, or turbulent relationships makes its visual and aural excess feel superfluous.
The titular queens of Queens of Drama, written by Langlois with Carlotta Coco and Thomas Colineau, are Mimi Madamour (Louiza Aura), an opera student who yearns to be the next Mariah Carey, and Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura), frontwoman of the queer punk band Slit. In 2005, Mimi and Billie meet at the auditions for an American Idol-style competition called Starlets Factory, where Billie is quickly rejected but Mimi advances. That night, an infatuated Mimi follows Billie to her band’s house gig at a lesbian bar. The two fall in love, despite their difference in temperament and desires, and Mimi joins Slit as she progresses on the televised competition. Mimi’s ultimate victory on Starlet Factory, though, drives a wedge between the lovers. Mimi’s nascent music career necessitates an image change — she goes blonde and sings Britney Spears-style bubblegum pop — and she distances herself from Billie privately and publicly, which both enrages and humiliates Billie. They make a final, contentious break just as Mimi reaches her zenith and Billie plummets to her nadir — but when the film flashes forward 10 years, their positions in the music industry have reversed, and they find themselves drawn back into each other’s orbit.
This tale is narrated in the year 2055 by Steevyshady (Bilal Hassani), a Perez Hilton-esque YouTube microcelebrity of the 2010s who gained a following by denigrating his idol Mimi after she fell apart in the public eye. Steevy’s coming-of-age provides its own parallel narrative to Mimi and Billie’s, as we see Steevy first encountering Mimi on TV in his childhood bedroom, after which we see him pop up in the narrative intermittently — each time more obsessed with Mimi, each time his identity becoming progressively calcified as a self-designated leader of the “Mimi Army.” Hassani’s performance is utterly unmodulated, a perpetual screech of obsession that emphasizes Steevyshady as a one-dimensional, exaggerated online persona, but grinds down the viewer’s patience too quickly. Likewise, we immediately understand that Steevyshady is unreasonably preoccupied and over-possessive of Mimi, and the fact that Langlois’ commentary on fandom starts and ends with this insight suggests that he does not have much more to say than what has already been made obvious.
This one-note stridency in both performance and content is indicative of Langlois’ general approach. Pop Mimi and punk Billie are a clear-cut dyad, with Mimi representing capitulation to the mainstream at the cost of personal integrity and Billie representing commitment to her countercultural identity at the cost of broader acceptance. The central characters are not given much shading beyond this—their reversal in fortunes in the film’s third act adds an interesting layer, but Langlois does not dig in deeply enough to meaningfully complicate their characterizations — and Aura and Ventura’s performances, though consistently committed, are not quite precise enough to transcend the limitations of their roles as written. Mimi and Billie’s numerous explosive arguments and earnest reconciliations are thus constrained by these weaknesses in script and performance, so that their relationship never reaches the melodramatic heights that could lead the viewer to emotionally invest in their relationship.
Queens of Drama is at its core an aesthetic experience, functioning in the kind of self-sustaining artificial environment featured in earlier queer films with postmodern influences, like Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Querelle and, more recently, Amanda Kramer’s Please Baby Please. Certain scenes do approach the glorious, manufactured excess needed to convincingly maintain this risky stylistic choice — particularly the performances of glossy-grungy anthems extolling bodybuilding women performed by Slit, and a duet between Billie and Mimi set in adjoining prison cells that makes some amusing visual references to Jean Genet’s Un chant d’amour — and Marine Atlan’s high-contrast, color-saturated cinematography gives the film an appropriately heightened look. Yet even in the realm of the aesthetic, Queens of Drama falters as often as it succeeds. The songs, written by numerous songwriters, tend to fall flat in their over-eagerness to titillate, and many of the built environments appear slapdash. The most obvious issue with Langlois’ bold aesthetic approach, though, is that his narrative material is simply too thin to sustain it, and the film’s sensory bombardment too quickly becomes merely exhausting rather than exciting.
DIRECTOR: Alexis Langlois; CAST: Gio Ventura, Louiza Aura, Bilal Hassani, Alma Jodorowsky, Nana Benamer; DISTRIBUTOR: Altered Innocence; IN THEATERS: April 18; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 54 min.
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