On the poster, Didier Bourdon as a transvestite. Mmm, I started watching the film with suspicion, dreading having to endure one of those heavy-handed comedies, complete with easy and smutty jokes. Happily I was wrong. In fact, from the very first minute, I was hooked by the offbeat tone of this detective comedy. First of all, the character of Madame Irma (ex Monsieur Edouard), a modest help in a local Brussels bar-restaurant, is treated with respect. At no time is she ridiculed, she is simply a man who has always felt like a woman and who, in order to keep in tune with her profound personality, has had to give up everything, including his life as a husband and father. In a blue housewife's apron, without forging his voice, Didier Bourdon embodies Irma with restraint, making her touching under the understanding gaze of the director, Nadine Monfils (her only production for the cinema). The situation in which Irma finds herself, having to reconnect with her adult daughter (Julie-Ann Roth, fresh and natural), is dealt with with sensitivity, far from the comic effects of "La Cage aux folles" for instance. The emphasis is not on "Look, how odd they are, those queers!" but on Irma as a human being, her questions, doubts and hesitations, then on her daughter's surprise and finally on the tenderness that is soon (re)born between the two. No preciosity or chuckles.
The story is police-like, but it is first and foremost a pretext (what interests Nadine Monfils the most is the portrait gallery and the offbeat atmosphere she aims to create). Nevertheless it stands out all right as a whodunit. Sufficiently well-structured, it concerns an investigation into the deaths of three young girls in a cemetery, with false culprits and a surprising ending. The narrative's main interest though, as already mentioned, is to make viewers cross paths with various eccentrics, starting with Commissioner Léon himself (Michel Blanc), a loner who knits in secret and never works without his clingy dog. Among other oddities haunting this gently ruined-up universe, let's mention a lousy but pretentious cook (Bouli Lanners), a barfly with a viper's tongue (Dominique Lavanant), an insolent secretary with depressing bad taste (Josiane Balasko), a very self-confident dwarf (Jean-Yves Thual), a fake blind Coluche look-alike (Franck Sasonoff), a cafe customer who never comes without his cockatiel (Rufus). And let's not forget the mother of the commissioner who is passionate about promotional games and accumulates ratty prizes (Annie Cordy, who speaks with delight in her Brussels accent), Léon's hopelessly clumsy right-hand man (Olivier Broche, the Deschiens' kid) and that's the least of it! In the course of this improbable (and ultimately tender) story, you also come across a thieving priest who shows off his underwear, a clone of the singer Plastic Bertrand even more nerdy than the original, a Guyanese waitress in a typical Brussels restaurant named "Aux Deux Chicons", while three tableaux vivants in homage to Magritte - three men in ball hats - appear without much logic.
In short, a film with the characteristic fantasy of the Belgian spirit. Constantly at the convergence of several genres (thriller, comedy of manners, absurd humour, surrealism, commitment to difference and tolerance), the film will displease those allergic to the mix of genres but will delight those with an open and uninhibited mind.
To be discovered urgently by the latter.
