“Alphonse”, by Nicolas Bedos: mouth of ego – Libération

2023-10-13 16:27:04

On Amazon, Bedos makes a gigolo father and son (Arditi and Dujardin) the support of a display as expected as it is revolting of his misogyny and vulgarity.

Landed on Prime Video this Thursday without promotion, almost surreptitiously, betraying a probable desire on the part of the platform to protect itself from the splash of scandals emanating from its director (four complaints for rape and sexual assault currently under investigation), the first series of Nicolas Bedos has already missed his discreet operation, with pachydermic silence – the incongruity of his surprise posting online will have produced the opposite of the expected effect, we only see her.

Being on everyone’s lips should certainly not displease this notorious fellatio obsessive (his main subject, here from the opening – putrid wet dream mixing jigs, high-ranking officers and guts in the style of Caen). But probably less so when the series despite itself takes on the air of a piece to add to the file, revealing a certain vision of sex, women, Donjuanism; or rather confirmatory, the Belle Epoque and Masquerade having already clearly shaped the Bedosian psyche.

Amazon obviously could not afford to scrap these six episodes (three broadcast for the moment) which we suppose to be expensive, marked by the director’s proven taste for heavy filming, large operatic movements, changes of light in the plane and the naphthalene yellow of the Pathé calibrations. Imbued, too, with its patent taste for castes, systematically separating indigent humanity from an elite of lords: on the one hand a kind of Epinal gloom, made of ugly metro, sheepish faces, soups slurped noisily, between fairytale misery (the fantinoid mother-whore of Masquerade) and prefabricated social realism, the pulse of which Bedos seems to take in picture books rotting in the attic; and on the other a great life made of ass, money, palaces, literary bullshit, which is more or less his own, or the one he claims to lead.

Blind loyalty to misogyny

Alphonse thus starts from a Homo populus, a mediocre stud (Jean Dujardin) flanked by a castrating fiancée and a humiliating boss, haunted by a childhood spent listening to his father (Pierre Arditi) fuck his mistresses. At the bottom of the bucket, Alphonse will reconnect with the latter, and discover an unthinkable double: not only were the mistresses in fact clients, but what’s more, the impotent old man needs his son to take up the prostitution torch – the opportunity for him to emerge from his victimized chrysalis and awaken his inner alpha male among a heterogeneous clientele: wealthy old women, mothers with doilies, farting bosses, etc.

There is Indiana Jones 3 in this father-son sexual competition and its scent of unspeakable taboo, but where Spielberg and Lucas had at least the elegance of the more or less subtle allusion, Bedos prefers the explicit (“and Above all, you don’t forget: you send everything into his mouth!”). And when he is not vulgar, he is inevitably verbose: here we recognize the distant heir of a decayed audioardism, steeped in a resonant taste for daddy bon mots, leaving the viewer with the impression of being heavily flirted with. by a drunken pillar of Flore with Hugolian verses and scabrous insinuations.

Above all, faced with such an enumeration of degrading feminine clichés gravitating around a two-headed masculine pole astounding with vanity, we can only recognize one thing in Bedos: a constancy of the disgusting, a full affirmation of himself without no dissimulation, a blind loyalty to his misogyny, which here takes the form of a bewildering parade of consenting hotties, none of whom exist except in the author’s narcissistic imagination. The series is intended to be a wide-open gateway to its fantasy universe, populated by ladies in trench coats who are secretly erotomaniacs waiting for a paragon of Pompidolian virility to come and free them from their bourgeois corsets to take them on all fours with a withering glance under a waterfall of eau de Cologne. All shame drunk.