Mon Homme

The irrepressible Bertrand Blier does not disappoint with his latest offering, the offensive, incisive, and hilarious Mon homme. A raunchy, outrageous sex farce along the lines of Get Out Your Handkerchiefs and Mon père, Mon homme begs the question as to whether it's a bold parable about capitalism and sexual politics or the misogynistic wet dream of a dirty old man with a camera. As with most of Blier's work, it's a little of both. Simultaneously crude, sly, sexy, and obnoxious, it's bound to titillate and assault most sensibilities

Anouk Grinberg, who comes off as an earthier Juliet Binoche, is a tough-cookie call girl who brazenly flaunts her independence and the honesty of her trade -- in a sophomoric scene she declares marriage a more iniquitous form of prostitution as she enlists a shy housewife into her profession. She finds her match and her heart of gold, however, when she offers shelter from the rain to a hirsute homeless man. The guy is gross and abusive, and she loves it, howling in rapture as he ravishes her. Converted from dominatrix to submissive in one session, she makes the bum her pimp.

What follows is a kind of Irma La Douce as directed by Luis Buñuel with additional dialogue by the Marquis de Sade. A sordid exposé of the mutual destructiveness and exploitiveness of gender roles in a consumer society, Mon homme takes its greatest delight in being exploitive itself. At the Kendall Square.

-- Peter Keough