There is a sharp, sublime Almodóvar film trapped inside the blurry outlines of François Ozon’s The New Girlfriend (Une nouvelle amie), as if aching to get out. You can see this in The New Girlfriend‘s sly opening, with its finely sculpted woman being dressed seemingly for a wedding before the gag is revealed, and in the moments of interlaced satire and desire in later sections. But Ozon’s highly polished surface allows for none of the Spanish filmmaker’s lurking wit or malevolence. Though Ozon’s penchant for putting pretty people in mildly baffling situations makes it hard to take his work straight, so to speak, this is the course with which you’re left in this ultimately confused film.
The New Girlfriend seems both out of time and place and not at all aware of the disconnect. Ozon based his screenplay on an old Ruth Rendell story about a woman who finds out that her best friend’s husband is a crossdresser, who in turn falls in love with her. The kernel of that story is still here. Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) has just lost her best friend from childhood, Laura (Isild Le Besco), whose husband, David (Romain Duris), is left to raise their baby alone. Trying to get out of her depression, Claire goes to see David one day, only to find him dolled up in wig, dress, and nylons. He says this is the only way he can stop the baby’s crying, pretending to be a woman like Laura. But soon the truth is out: David has been a crossdresser for years, Laura knew and didn’t judge, and it’s something that he’s going to keep doing because it’s all that makes him happy these days.
Claire’s reaction is the first off-key element in this disjointed production. “You’re a pervert,” she says, her eyes wide. The vehemence with which she utters that word, and all the consequent scurrying about to keep his secret a secret, is jarring. This is not to say that her reaction is impossible in the year 2015, but given the eruption into public consciousness of transgender issues in recent years, her antipathy toward David’s secret hobby gives the film the whiff of a cultural artifact from a different time.
The movie underlines this feeling with melodramatic, old-fashioned score and handsomely composed cinematography, both suggesting it’s a hand-wringing “issue” film from the mid-century. The New Girlfriend pairs David’s deeper explorations of his female persona, named “Virginia”, with Claire’s increasingly confused feelings of friendship and desire for David/Virginia. There’s some fun to be had in watching David play dress-up games with Claire, and Ozon even gives them a pop song-scored shopping montage straight out of the 1980s. Less successfully, the movie assumes implicit drama in the moments where David steps out into the wider world as Virginia, wondering whether he’ll be caught.
Although the marquee attraction here is David’s secret life, the film’s more engaging story is Claire’s, and not just because Demoustier’s work is more nuanced than Duris’. She has a perfectly supportive and semi-clueless husband Gilles (Raphaël Personnaz), so it’s just a matter of time before she starts thinking about cuckolding him. This means that her relationship with David might work on multiple levels, with Claire’s need to commune with her dead friend, her desire for a girlfriend with whom can do girlfriend things, and her unresolved interest in what Virginia’s elaborate nylons and makeup represents. Claire goes from making dutiful love to Gilles to throwing him a wild time in bed after being turned on by sharing in Virginia’s feminine accoutrements.
For all its boundary-blurring kink and old Hollywood-style gloss, The New Girlfriend eventually loses its way. In previous films like Potiche, Ozon maintains a structure of delicately constructed moods, but this one can’t seem to settle on a particular point of view: is it overheated satire, wicked fun or straight-on melodrama? Even worse, despite the film’s apparently progressive and empathetic view of David’s interest, it still ends up treating him as yet another tragic transvestite.
The movie provides enough dark and secretive material to have made a first-rate potboiler. But the jokey detours, busy screenplay, and Claire’s random erotic compulsions — she imagines romantic encounters between herself and Laura and between David and Gilles — muddle the focus.