I am not an easy man (2018)

May 31, 2018 5:54 AM

A shameless chauvinist gets a taste of his own medicine when he wakes up in a world dominated by women and locks horns with a powerful female author.

I am not an easy man (Je ne suis pas un homme facile) is the follow-up to Éléonore Pourriat's viral short Oppressed majority (MeFi discussion). Unlike the short, however, I am not an easy man is a romantic comedy relying on romcom tropes. It is the first French-language film commissioned by Netflix.

Interview of Eléanore Pourriat

posted by elgilito (3 comments total)

The strongest point of the movie is the world building, since all the large and small interactions between the characters involve some sort of gender-flipping, and in many cases gender-flipped power dynamics (most men in the movie fully internalize their status). There's also a great attention to detail, such as the bookshelf including masterpieces such In the Shadow of Young Boys in Flower by Marcelle Proust and Of Mice and Women by Jane Steinbeck, or the gender-flipped version of the opening scene (NSFW) of Godard's Contempt. The story itself is perhaps less developed: the main character assumes several roles at once: fish out of water, audience surrogate and reforming asshole (whether he reforms at all is not clear, but he seems to enjoy his sexy short shorts) and as a result his story arc is a little bit cut short. Marie-Sophie Ferdane is just wonderful in her portrayal of the "powerful author" character, both talented and full of themselves.

Short note: while there's no shortage of movies using the "gender bender" trope (usually featuring a man "trapped" in a woman's body, as in Jumanji: Welcome to the jungle), movies featuring a whole gender-flipped world are much less common, if not inexistent. Alice Guy's The consequences of feminism (1906) seems to be a movie version of the anti-suffragette cartoons of the time. Amazon-themed movies such as War Goddess or Amazons don't really count. The only movie I can think of is Riad Sattouf's Jacky in Women's Kingdom, which is a gender-flipped Handmaid's Tale, much funnier, but still oppressive.
posted by elgilito at 7:23 AM on May 31, 2018 [3 favorites]

I LOVED this film so much. The world building in body language of the actors delivered so well, they thought through so many tiny touches. There were gestures and things i hadnt considered so gendered until then - the socks on shoes, the portraits over desks! The counting of partners, the shaming of sweat on boys and the gendered sex teen conversations... The ending refusing to go any further stopped it being preaching or happy ever after.
posted by dorothyisunderwood at 1:51 AM on June 1, 2018 [2 favorites]

Yeah for me it was really the attention to detail in the world building that made this such a great film. I admit I was sad when it ended because I really wanted to see how she would deal with the "real world."
posted by miss-lapin at 9:08 AM on June 1, 2018 [1 favorite]