Wow! Such a good movie.

One of my all time favorites.

n my opinion it was a great movie with some interesting elements, even though having some plot holes and the ending probably was just too messy and crammed together, but still fun to watch and not your casual movie that is similar to all other ones.

It isn't all that great, actually. Really cheesy and very predicable of how certain scenes are gonna turn play out. However, I guess that's the charm of it all, because I would consider this one of my guilty pleasures.

French author Emmanuel Carrère's sole venture into feature filmmaking by far, LA MOUSTACHE is adapted from his own novel published in 1986, a head-scratching story about a middle-aged French man Marc (Lindon), whose life starts to collapse after he shaved his trademark moustache on a whim, and everyone around starts to behave that they have never seen him in moustache, including his wife Agnès (Devos).So, under this presumption, there could be two possible explanations: either Agnès is right, so Marc must have some serious psychological issues should be treated with kid gloves; or, Agnès is lying, when having dinner at their friends', Agnès is accused as an incorrigible liar by her ex- boyfriend Serge (Amalric), which might insinuate that an underhand conspiracy theory is in the pipeline. Cinematically, it is rather an intriguing premise, however, in hindsight, as the film turns out to be an experiment completely open to each individual's own interpretation, Carrère knowingly oscillates between these two scenarios lest the plot would veer to either direction with no turning back.Take the example of the photo albums Marc finds, it is a trip to Bali years ago and obviously he is sporting a moustache in every picture, but, instead of pushing forward his proofs to Agnès or his friends, he chooses to withhold it until the album goes missing, if that's a slip of mind, later we clearly see his moustache in both the head-shots in his wallets and his passport, why not show them to contest his belief, or just visit his parents, who should know the truth, but no, because, it would channel the story into a dead-end, either Agnès is right or she is playing a bigger game to dupe him, either way, it would lose the mystical allure.So, out of wits to keep the suspense rolling, Carrère employs a brisk geographical shift to Hong Kong, where Marc aimlessly and tediously moseys on ferry rides, an economical transportation in a metropolitan city (which might be used to save a fair amount of cost in shooting whilst the crew could enjoy their vacation), so as to buy some time to let his moustache grow back, then, bang! Surreal events materialise again, and viewers have no sooner recovered from the bamboozling revelation than the film reaches its succinct finish line, admittedly, it is an in-your-face anticlimax.Masked as an existential fable, LA MOUSTACHE intrigues at first, but pretty soon loses its sway and resorts to absurd-ism and metaphysics, which could be an alternative to lift the bar, like Denis Villeneuve did in ENEMY (2013), but in this case, it only betrays the filmmaker's incompetence to concoct up anything could possibly give a plausible justification, a cheap cop-out always tastes bitter and gets under one's skin.

This should have been a much better movie that it was as so many others here have essentially written.The DVD came with a director/screenwriter/author interview (i.e. one and the same person, Emmanuelle Carrere) which my wife and I watched after the movie in an effort to understand what he was trying to achieve and which we had obviously missed. In it, Carrere implies (it was in French so I can only give you the gist of it) that he expected the viewer to wonder if it was that Marc was going crazy, whether it was his wife Agnes who was going crazy, whether it was a grand conspiracy, or whether Marc had somehow slipped into a parallel universe (or universes plural) when he shaves off his moustache. If that was his intention, then he failed miserably in the film.Let's take the points one at a time.Was Marc insane? Well, if he wanted us to believe that, then he NEVER should have shown us the moustache! And yet, in act 1, scene 1, 2 seconds into the film, he shows us the moustache! Ergo, it exists. Ergo, Marc is not nuts. If we were perhaps supposed to believe that the early moustache scene was just a figment of Marc's imagination, then fine, but then why on earth show us Marc looking at photos of him sporting his moustache a few minutes later and showing US the photos at the same time. The moustache existed. End of theory. The problem is not that Marc is insane.Sadly, this could have been achieved so easily with the proper direction. DON'T SHOW US THE MOUSTACHE!!! EVER. If we never see it, then we will have doubts about Marc's sanity. In the opening scene, hide his face. Perhaps under a cover of thick shaving foam so we aren't sure what's beneath. Perhaps we only hear his voice calling out from the bathroom as he has gone into shave before going out with his wife. But don't show us his face! When he looks at the photos of himself sporting a moustache then WE shouldn't see the photos. Only Marc sees them and we should be left wondering what he is seeing in his confused mind.Is Agnes insane? I never saw this as a possibility so why suggest it? It made no sense to believe this. After all, I counted at least 6 other people presented in the film who also didn't believe that Marc had ever had a moustache. So why would we believe Agnes was insane when so many others deny the moustache as well? If that was one of his intentions, then he failed totally here.Was it a grand conspiracy? Well, at least it was a possibility for a few minutes but even that doesn't hold water. How could the child Lara pull it off? How could the conspirators have control over the cafe owner? Most of all, how could they arrange for phone numbers to no longer work or for addresses to disappear? Grand conspiracy? If we were supposed to believe that as a possibility, then some of the conspirators had to have at least let their masks partially drop early on with some sort of statement that had double meanings to suggest that there was at least something going on. Perhaps the cafe owner could have said something like, "there's something different about you but I can't put my finger on it ...". Something vague to leave open a possibility. But there was nothing. So much for grand conspiracies.What does that leave? That Marc is in some sort of science fiction world where he has slipped into a parallel universe by shaving off his moustache and that he keeps moving into universes with more and more differences as the minutes pass. What else could it have been? Nothing remained. That's what I believed throughout and there was no possibility of anything else.Unfortunately, I felt even the ending was all too predictable but I won't go into the flaws with it as it would give away too much. I could envision a variation that would have been far more interesting but I don't dare include it in a spoilerless review.Sadly, I'm sure this was all done very well in the novel (not that I've read it). We never see the moustache in the novel of course. We only have his word for it (Marc or the narrator) that it exists. We will always have doubts. The other possibilities might also have been better presented. I'll never know as I can't be bothered tracking down the novel.I have long believed that an author of a novel should NEVER be allowed to direct his own work or even be the sole screenwriter when a movie is suggested. Too often, it ends up being a disaster and that is what has happened here. Writers just too often do not see the problem with what they have written when they try to make it visual and that is exactly what has happened with this film.What worked (I assume) in the novel, does NOT work on the screen but Carrere was so tied up in what he wrote years earlier that he doesn't see the flaws of putting his written work onto the screen. An independent director might have seen the problems of allowing us to see the moustache and done it entirely differently so that doubts remained about what was going. Sorry to say, we'll never know.By the way, can somebody please tell me what the point of the multiple ferry crossings was? Was it symbolic of something? That perhaps was the most baffling sequence in the film and something that made no sense to either my wife or myself. Was it symbolic of something? If so, it escaped us.

Maybe this movie does not follow normal or accepted modes of exposition. Maybe what is infuriating some of the posters is that they have been fooled into thinking that it is a 'typical' movie - albeit with a somewhat strange premise - and that it will resolve like similar movies (Vertigo, Sixth Sense come to mind).Actually, it has more in common with surrealist movies by directors like Luis Bunuel (i.e. 'Andalusian Dog') than Hitchcock, Shyamalan or Lynch. I must admit, I didn't come this understanding at first. I was tired when I watched it and knew nothing about it beforehand. I watched it through to the end and then sat there stewing and wondering what I had just watched.The story is told through the eyes of the main character, Marc, but unlike Bunuel or Dali, this director did not scream 'dream' or 'hallucination' at the audience. Instead, you are lulled into believing that you are 'viewing' a story unfold rather than being in the story - inhabiting Marc's point of view.I felt the frustration that someone who is going through a breakdown (or nightmare) might feel. Feeling betrayed by those close to you (Bruno and Agnes discussing the 'chemical strait-jacket' she slipped into his drink) - allowing emotion to override logic (why DIDN'T he show those pictures to Agnes??). Taking for granted that it was moving in a temporally forward direction rather than picking up at the middle moving to the beginning then winding up at the... beginning? I am confused and betrayed, Marc is confused and betrayed. Many viewers probably felt ripped off (judging from some of the comments on this forum). What did I (Marc) imagine? What was real? Who are the villains? Are there villains? Was this a dream? Did I have a psychotic episode?You can be angry at being tricked into believing many things in this movie. Tricked by the style that doesn't clue you into its intentions causing you to walk away unsatisfied. Tricked by the dead-end narrative lines carried by Hitchcock or Lynchian devices that don't deliver the implied payoff. And unlike a movie such as the Sixth Sense, going back to review it for hints of the ending is pointless. We all know he had a mustache in the photos. We all know he went to Hongkong by himself (don't we?).It might be that the great sin of this movie is that its premise of irreality was never signaled. Everything appeared real - just as it might appear to a victim of mental illness.

The basic story idea for LA MOUSTACHE is unique and intrigued me. A seemingly insignificant action occurs and then a man's entire existence changes! This occurs when the lead, on a whim, shaves off his mustache. Oddly, his wife didn't notice nor did his friends. At first, it's no big deal, but later the man becomes angry--how could they be so self-absorbed that they didn't notice or care?! Oddly, when confronted, they have no recollection that he had one, even though the audience saw he had one and saw pictures of the man with the mustache! This part of the film was interesting and pulled me in very well.However, out of the blue, the man disappears to Hong Kong and from then on the plot really makes no sense at all. At first, I thought I'd missed something when the film ended--there were just too many dangling plot points and things that just confused me. So, I watched the "making of featurette" on the DVD and one of the main characters confided that she read the script and she was also confused and it made no sense. Some people might like this and normally I don't mind a film that leaves unanswered questions, but this goes way beyond this to just confusing and...well, stupid. It took a film that might have earned a 7 or 8 and made it, at best, a 4.Decent acting but a bad script sink this film. But, like so many sub-par films, the DVD case made it sound amazing and worthwhile with phrases like "A paranoid thriller in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock" or "...a mini-masterwork". Yeah, right. The film had little to do with Hitchcock's style and comparisons to Hitchcock are a dime a dozen. Many of Chabrol's films (even his bad ones) are also often compared to Hitchcock's and I'm getting sick of this disingenuous advertising. One of the very few films that might really deserve this comparison is the original LES DIABOLIQUES. In contrast, LA MOUSTACHE seemed about as "Hitchcockian" as MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE III!