The Dark Shadows of 'La Moustache'

A man who has had a mustache his entire adult life impulsively decides to shave it off. Not only does no one notice, but his wife and friends tell him he has never worn a mustache. Is he crazy? In Hollywood, a conceit like that might once have become a screwball bourgeois comedy or a psychological thriller, a la "Gaslight." But this is "La Moustache," a French film, and it's dark, dark, dark. (See review on Page 35.)

For his feature directing debut, novelist Emmanuel Carrère adapted his book of the same name, writing the screenplay with Jérôme Beaujour. "The novel is darker than the film," he says by phone from his Paris home. "The novel ends very badly."

In fact, the movie's ending is almost happy, hopeful, a love story of sorts -- one baby step closer to Hollywood fare, one might say. Apparently, Carrère has changed his mind about what happens to his protagonist, Marc, in the 20 years since he wrote the book. "I've had more experiences now," he says as his 4-month-old daughter wails in the background -- and keeps it up during most of the interview. ("She must be hungry," he says by way of apology. "I'm here all alone.")

"La Moustache" centers on Marc and Agnès Thiriez, played by Vincent Lindon ("Friday Night," "Chaos") and Emmanuelle Devos ("Read My Lips," "The Beat That My Heart Skipped"). Much of the action takes place in a spacious Parisian duplex where the couple live. Except, of course, for the part that takes place in Hong Kong.

Maybe it's the seeming randomness of that development -- a paranoid Marc jets off to Hong Kong to spend his days riding the ferry between Kowloon and Hong Kong Island -- that gives the film its je ne sais quoi , its distinct feeling of French-ness.

"I hope it's not too French!" Carrère says. "There are a lot of influences that are not," among them Alfred Hitchcock, whose oeuvre is suggested by the ever-present tension and dread in "La Moustache."

When adapting his novel, Carrère had Lindon in mind for the lead, not just because of his talent, but because, Carrère says, "he doesn't look crazy. I wanted an actor who looks very, how do you say, rooted in the earth. I wanted an actor where there wasn't any ambiguity. In the opening scene, you see him, and you don't think, 'That's a crazy man.' "

As played by Devos, Agnès -- the woman who denies the mustache, the object of both Marc's frustration and his devotion -- appears even-keeled and warm, hardly the shrew driving her hubby to the loony bin. Throughout, the melody from Philip Glass's "Concerto pour violon et orchestre, 1987" helps ratchet up the tension, a soundtrack almost as chilling as the theme from "Jaws."

But unlike "Jaws" or any American thriller, the tension created is not relieved at the end. That doesn't stop people from trying to figure out a solution to the film's puzzles, though.

What Agnès and Marc experience -- what Carrère has referred to as "this mustache business" -- is a metaphor for what every couple goes through, he says. "It doesn't take such a fantastic form, of course, but I think in all couples there is a problem of trust."

One last question for the director before he gets back to tending to his daughter, still fussing in the background. Monsieur Carrère, have you ever worn a mustache? "Never," he says. Are you sure? "Yeah, I'm sure," he says. "Yeah."

East German Films

In conjunction with New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Goethe-Institut New York and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst's DEFA Film Library, the American Film Institute, National Gallery of Art and Goethe-Institut Washington present "Rebels With a Cause," a retrospective of East German films, most of which have never been shown in the West.

From Monday through Dec. 7, 15 films from 1953 to 1990 will be screened at the AFI Silver Theatre, the National Gallery's East Building and the Goethe-Institut. The first, screening Monday at 6:30 at Goethe, is "The Architects (Die Architekten)," about a young architect trying to work under communist constraints. Tidbit from the program notes: "Although filmed only a year after the fall of the Wall, its disassembly was so complete that the film team found themselves having to reconstruct a portion to represent 1989." See the "Repertory" list on Page 48 for more information.