Those looking for a good thriller should be pleased enough and those seeking a serious art film will get plenty of philosophy with their pretty pictures.
La Moustache (2005)
Tomatometer
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Reviews Counted:41
Fresh:35
Rotten:6
Average Rating:7.3/10
Consensus: Though the premise may be modest on the surface, Carrere uses a man and his mustache that may or may not exist as a springboard into psychological suspense and unsettling questions.
Runtime: 86 mins
Genre: Foreign Films
Synopsis: One day, on a whim, Marc decides to shave off the mustache he's worn all of his adult life. He waits patiently for his wife's reaction, but neither she nor his friends seem to notice. Stranger... One day, on a whim, Marc decides to shave off the mustache he's worn all of his adult life. He waits patiently for his wife's reaction, but neither she nor his friends seem to notice. Stranger still, when he finally tells them, they all insist he never had a mustache. Is Marc going mad? Is he the victim of some elaborate conspiracy? Or has something in the world's order gone terribly awry? Adapted from his own novel, Emmanuel Carrere has crafted an engrossing existential thriller, a story about a man who inadvertently loses himself. -- © Cinema Guild [More]
Starring: Emmanuelle Devos, Vincent Lindon, Hippolyte Girardot, Mathieu Amalric
Starring: Emmanuelle Devos, Vincent Lindon, Hippolyte Girardot, Mathieu Amalric
Director: Emmanuel Carrere
Director: Emmanuel Carrere
Studio: Cinema Guild
Reviews for La Moustache
Bristling with existential doubt and ennui . . . Carrère's half-nightmare, half-dream vision of one man's imprisonment in his own life remains satisfyingly unresolved and stubbornly unique.
Kafkaesque story of man who shaves trademark moustache. Afterwards everybody--wife included--insists that he has never had one!
As with the recent French films Lemming and The Bridesmaid, La Moustache generates a high level of tension with the most mundane things.
A mind-bending treat adapted by director Emmanuel Carrère from his novel.
What the movie lacks visually, it makes up for with the performances, especially by Lindon, who leads us on a journey we want to stick with even if we can't fully understand.
In one sense it's what might be called 'typically French,' an exquisitely observed fable of bourgeois life that is mordant, witty and yet low-key. In another sense, it's what might be called 'nuts.'
It's a brief, simple film that never overreaches but, if you're into it, it raises fascinating questions about identity.
As intelligently as Carrère handles this material, giving it just the right hint of distance and ambiguity, La Moustache tends to drift toward the mechanisms of the thriller.
The Hitchcock-style story...is intriguing from start to finish, despite the lack of answers to the many questions it raises. And, that ain't shabby.
Leaps from a gripping identity thriller into a strange yet equally involving adventure about the bounds of self-knowledge and the incredible liberty of disregarding them.
...a movie about identity and marriage that raises many questions and supplies many answers without actually giving any.
An elegantly acted psychological puzzle, it's like watching a nervous breakdown from the inside out.
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