Iris et les hommes review
Director: Caroline Vignal
Writer: Caroline Vignal and Noémie de Lapparent
Stars: Laure Calamy, Vincent Elbaz and Suzanne De Baecque
Running Time: 98 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
Caroline Vignal’s new feature Iris et les hommes (aka It’s Raining Men in Canada or Iris and the Men in Australia) is an attempt to recapture the fruitful collaboration between director and star Laure Calamy’s 2020 hit Antoinette in the Cévennes (aka My Donkey, My Lover & I). Released during Covid, Antoinette in the Cévennes was an antidote to lockdown blues, a film of wide open spaces, southern French hillsides and flirty, impassioned laughs. It’s no wonder it was embraced among fans of comedic French cinema.
If her previous work was a Mamma Mia-esque holiday romance movie, the type you need on a particularly hard day, then Iris et les hommes leans into more sexually provocative material, something closer to Pedro Almodóvar’s morally ambiguous sex-comedies. In fact, Almodóvar is name-dropped during the movie, suggesting director Vignal is well aware of the comparison.
In overcast Paris, sexually frustrated dentist Iris (Calamy) is desperate for some bedroom adventures. She’s lived a largely monogamous existence, spent either raising two daughters or filling in the cavities of strangers. Stéphane (Vincent Elbaz) is the type of husband that basks in the glow of his work laptop whilst they’re both in bed. She needs something more.
Whilst at her daughter’s school, a woman gives Iris some advice – why not sign up to a phone app that matches happily married people who want to have affairs? It seems only in Paris you could get such a suggestion and have it still feel like a normal Tuesday. In the spirit of impulsiveness, Iris joins this Ashley Madison-like app and the messages and pictures start rolling in. As she works, as she cooks, as she walks the rues, the high pitched buzzing of her phone repeatedly indicates the fantasy of sexual attention. The simple idea of how to describe her own body to a stranger becomes titillation for her self-awakening.
In one scene, in bed with her husband, we again hear the incessant buzzing of endless text messages. When asked by her husband what is she doing, she instantly conjures a believable lie: “eBay.” To director Vignal these evolving trysts are insistently playful – sincerely treated with a sense of fun and vitality. Any moral questioning is left to our imaginations. This is not a movie willing to task you with the painful complexities of real life infidelity. It’s a fantasy, a husband-holiday movie that creates an unrealistic safe-space for cheeky Parisian dreams.
And yet it’s a relief that within this fantasy, the expectations of body image remain refreshingly grounded. For the 49-year old Calamy, she glows with beauty and embraces her age (apart from the poster, where’s she looks disturbingly young). For the many men she meets (and sleeps with), they are delightfully ordinary, themselves a mix of nervous tension and awkward initiations. In one case, after talking a flirtatious game, her date treats us to a bizarre and funny striptease that is more Mr Bean than Magic Mike, but the film never completely laughs at his expense, not entirely. People are sometimes awkward, sometimes funny, and the film is smart enough to allow us to witness it without intense judgement.
This is the kind of sexual realism that keeps Iris et les hommes engaging. And yet the fantasy does ask a lot from you – none of the mysterious men she meets ever pose a danger, none of the meetings themselves have any real consequences, none of her behaviour is deeply questioned. In an audacious last scene, the film even manages to absolve her of guilt. This is the price we pay for a fantasy – the film can’t really question the lead character. She’s a great lover, but she’d be a terrible dentist.
How much enjoyment you derive from this movie is based on how willing you are to accept infidelity as a playful element of a romantic comedy. It’s a tricky question. Iris’s husband is impressively not reduced to the bad guy – she is still very much in dedicated to him. Here we’re enjoying the company of a character who is cheating the person she loves relentlessly. I thought often of Almodóvar’s Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, which defiantly mixed kidnapping and romance to unusual affect. He got great acclaim for disregarding an absolute moral standard and embracing a uncomfortable fantasy, a world were we’re unsure if kidnapping someone is not totally evil.
Vignal is channeling a similar vision, a story where she’s unabashedly avoiding the truth and accepting the lie as an experiment, barb wire served on a slice of angel cake. Everything’s dusted with such a light touch, you’d hardly think having an affair with a lot of men and not telling your family is a perfectly acceptable idea. Yet for this intentional avoidance, there is also an admirable dedication to the subject of female desire, a fully formed female hero’s story for the pursuit of the body, something too seldom represented.
Maybe the cheekiness here is too seductive. Maybe it’s difficult for me to dislike a movie with this much smiling. It’s infectious. As the film navigates a late disruptive moment in Iris’s marriage, I did also yearn for a return to the fantasy of Paris, it’s restaurants, it’s awkward intimacy, it’s late night wines and funny characterizations to not end too soon. I’m as much to blame as anyone for enjoying the fantasy while it lasted.
