‘Queens of Drama’ Review: Queer French Musical Serves a Fabulous, Glittery Extravaganza
We are now far enough removed from the glittercore of early 2000s pop music that its bubble-gum aesthetic has become as potent a post-Y2K period signifier as low-rise jeans and blond highlights. French filmmaker Alexis Langlois’ deliciously campy musical “Queens of Drama” feels like it’s been conjured up inside a Claire’s store where “…Baby One More Time” keeps playing on loop. But this tragic queer love story between a pop star and a punk rocker doesn’t let the patina of nostalgia that envelops it cloud the thorny ideas about queerness, performance, feminism and femininity that Langlois packs into his gleefully deranged period piece.
Such derangement is immediately apparent. In its first moments, Langlois turns his audience into “U-Tube” viewers tuning into the latest missive from an aging vlogger. Steevy Shady is played by Eurovision contestant and famed YouTuber Bilal Hassani. Sporting pink-hued wraparound sunglasses, a horrid asymmetrical blond-streaked hairdo, and some surgically enhanced cheekbones, Steevy is surrounded by posters and memorabilia of the pop diva from their youth to which their channel is devoted: Mimi Madamour. The year is 2055 and, while they may have once been “the sharpest Botox needle in the box” (think Perez Hilton), Steevy has mellowed enough to set the record straight on what derailed Mimi’s career all those decades earlier.
Langlois’ choice of narrative frame to tell the tale of the torrid romance between teen pop idol Mimi (Louiza Aura) and punk icon Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura) immediately announces what kind of glittering confection his film aspires to be. Langlois clearly wants us to live within the world of 2000s pop diva fandom. That environment gave rise (and then tore down) the likes of Britney Spears, a figure “Queens of Drama” apes in quite obvious ways. There is a lavish devotion to a world where Mimi’s success in a TV talent competition turns her into a midriff-baring singing sensation akin to coy Britney, but also French singers like Lorie and Ophélie Winter.
Much to Steevy’s chagrin, however, there’s no way to trace Mimi’s stardom without also tracking how Mimi first bloomed in the arms of a young aspiring artist who seems modeled on “Twilight”-era Kristen Stewart. Mimi is quiet and demure, and therefore quite malleable by music execs. Billie, meanwhile, is a raucous force of nature. She gets thrown out of her audition for “Starlettes en Herbe” for calling out the show’s judges for being agents of the patriarchy.
Billie’s act is raw, sensuous and radical. She sings about the seductive power of working-class butches. She performs while gladly baring her chest binders and lustfully croons about biker girls while presenting Mimi (in the audience, utterly transfixed) with a butt plug she pulls right out of her own behind. The two couldn’t be more different. One’s a little bit pop star, the other’s a bit of a punk icon. But they’re immediately attracted to one another.
As their romance blossoms, so does Mimi’s career. Eventually, she needs to insist Billie not show up at her music video shoots. Their closeted relationship may well cost her the global fandom she’s slowly amassing after ironing and dyeing her hair and putting on a good-girl act for the cameras.
The heartbreak and breakup that follows ends up being only table-setting for the film’s latter half. Years later, the two former lovers find themselves once more in the limelight when a revamped (new hair, new look), if still angered, Billie reemerges to become a worldwide sensation in her own right ready to settle some old scores.
Langlois treats Billie and Mimi’s romance as a kind of epic tragedy, with Steevy as a constant Greek chorus to help it along. But the film’s stylized aesthetic, which feels like Fassbinder, Minnelli and Waters filtered together through MTV’s “TRL,” continually anchors its musical melodrama in something queerer and rarer still. The film is true to its title. There’s plenty of drama to go around — especially once gossipy talk show hosts, cruel vloggers and even campy drag queens join in on the action to tear its titular drama queens to shreds. In the process, “Queens of Drama” reminds us how at the start of the millennium girl-power feminism went hand-in-hand with a noxious kind of homophobia.
Within the film’s glittering absurdity, Langlois shows us how easily the monster that was fame and fandom could turn on women like Mimi and Billie. Both find truth and escape from the music they produce. Yet they each struggle with how to live up to the public images (via wigs and singles, music videos and live performances) they’ve created for themselves. How fame and the closet collide becomes a key interest of the film. In this, the casting of Asia Argento, as a pop diva past her prime who herself may have shunned a female lover of hers who was once a punk goddess, is proof of this French musical’s tongue-in-cheek sensibility.
“If you don’t like intense drama, explosive emotions, unbridled romanticism, runny make-up, and above all, heart-wrenching songs,” Steevy warns us early on, then Mimi and Billie’s story is likely not for you. The only way to enjoy “Queens of Drama” is to surrender to its excesses. Which explains why it works so perfectly as a bold lesbian melodrama best told in pop and punk numbers. Even when they don’t have radio-ready titles or lyrics, Pierre Desprat’s songs make “Queens of Drama” feel like a cohesive musical in its own right.
Like a well-choreographed drag number that knows that to mock is to love — and that you can never have too much glitter on if you want to dazzle under a disco ball — “Queens of Drama” is a wink of a good time. Then again, how can you not be won over by a film that makes its central romantic tune (“Fistée jusqu’au coeur”) into an equally tender and passionate ode to fisting?
Such derangement is immediately apparent. In its first moments, Langlois turns his audience into “U-Tube” viewers tuning into the latest missive from an aging vlogger. Steevy Shady is played by Eurovision contestant and famed YouTuber Bilal Hassani. Sporting pink-hued wraparound sunglasses, a horrid asymmetrical blond-streaked hairdo, and some surgically enhanced cheekbones, Steevy is surrounded by posters and memorabilia of the pop diva from their youth to which their channel is devoted: Mimi Madamour. The year is 2055 and, while they may have once been “the sharpest Botox needle in the box” (think Perez Hilton), Steevy has mellowed enough to set the record straight on what derailed Mimi’s career all those decades earlier.
Langlois’ choice of narrative frame to tell the tale of the torrid romance between teen pop idol Mimi (Louiza Aura) and punk icon Billie Kohler (Gio Ventura) immediately announces what kind of glittering confection his film aspires to be. Langlois clearly wants us to live within the world of 2000s pop diva fandom. That environment gave rise (and then tore down) the likes of Britney Spears, a figure “Queens of Drama” apes in quite obvious ways. There is a lavish devotion to a world where Mimi’s success in a TV talent competition turns her into a midriff-baring singing sensation akin to coy Britney, but also French singers like Lorie and Ophélie Winter.
Much to Steevy’s chagrin, however, there’s no way to trace Mimi’s stardom without also tracking how Mimi first bloomed in the arms of a young aspiring artist who seems modeled on “Twilight”-era Kristen Stewart. Mimi is quiet and demure, and therefore quite malleable by music execs. Billie, meanwhile, is a raucous force of nature. She gets thrown out of her audition for “Starlettes en Herbe” for calling out the show’s judges for being agents of the patriarchy.
Billie’s act is raw, sensuous and radical. She sings about the seductive power of working-class butches. She performs while gladly baring her chest binders and lustfully croons about biker girls while presenting Mimi (in the audience, utterly transfixed) with a butt plug she pulls right out of her own behind. The two couldn’t be more different. One’s a little bit pop star, the other’s a bit of a punk icon. But they’re immediately attracted to one another.
As their romance blossoms, so does Mimi’s career. Eventually, she needs to insist Billie not show up at her music video shoots. Their closeted relationship may well cost her the global fandom she’s slowly amassing after ironing and dyeing her hair and putting on a good-girl act for the cameras.
The heartbreak and breakup that follows ends up being only table-setting for the film’s latter half. Years later, the two former lovers find themselves once more in the limelight when a revamped (new hair, new look), if still angered, Billie reemerges to become a worldwide sensation in her own right ready to settle some old scores.
Langlois treats Billie and Mimi’s romance as a kind of epic tragedy, with Steevy as a constant Greek chorus to help it along. But the film’s stylized aesthetic, which feels like Fassbinder, Minnelli and Waters filtered together through MTV’s “TRL,” continually anchors its musical melodrama in something queerer and rarer still. The film is true to its title. There’s plenty of drama to go around — especially once gossipy talk show hosts, cruel vloggers and even campy drag queens join in on the action to tear its titular drama queens to shreds. In the process, “Queens of Drama” reminds us how at the start of the millennium girl-power feminism went hand-in-hand with a noxious kind of homophobia.
Within the film’s glittering absurdity, Langlois shows us how easily the monster that was fame and fandom could turn on women like Mimi and Billie. Both find truth and escape from the music they produce. Yet they each struggle with how to live up to the public images (via wigs and singles, music videos and live performances) they’ve created for themselves. How fame and the closet collide becomes a key interest of the film. In this, the casting of Asia Argento, as a pop diva past her prime who herself may have shunned a female lover of hers who was once a punk goddess, is proof of this French musical’s tongue-in-cheek sensibility.
“If you don’t like intense drama, explosive emotions, unbridled romanticism, runny make-up, and above all, heart-wrenching songs,” Steevy warns us early on, then Mimi and Billie’s story is likely not for you. The only way to enjoy “Queens of Drama” is to surrender to its excesses. Which explains why it works so perfectly as a bold lesbian melodrama best told in pop and punk numbers. Even when they don’t have radio-ready titles or lyrics, Pierre Desprat’s songs make “Queens of Drama” feel like a cohesive musical in its own right.
Like a well-choreographed drag number that knows that to mock is to love — and that you can never have too much glitter on if you want to dazzle under a disco ball — “Queens of Drama” is a wink of a good time. Then again, how can you not be won over by a film that makes its central romantic tune (“Fistée jusqu’au coeur”) into an equally tender and passionate ode to fisting?