“Deception as a source of truth”: retrospectively, the subtitle of Alexis Langlois’s Paris 8 University memoir about Magdalena Montezuma, Werner Schroeter’s muse, is a brilliant prophecy of his future work. From his first feature film, Mascarade (Masquerade) (2012), he imposed his outrageously queer and personal world, further developed in Trinkets and Dark Thoughts (2016), an ode to marginals and insubordination, entirely shot in an afterparty. His next step into colorful activism will be Terror, Sisters! (2019) with his four transgender friends fantasizing their revenge upon nasty transphobes whose cartoonish appearance make the values they stand for seem even more ridiculous. The childish and immodest charm hides a fragility, as in Your Young Years Will Dry Your Tears (2016), relating a teenage moment of rupture that revisits the musical genre in a pixel era Demy/Legrand style. Follows The Demons of Dorothy, a wild supernatural and frantic ‘mise en, abyme’, in which the heroine, an aspiring filmmaker faces the industry’s dark side, fighting against dubious producers more intent on financing mainstream heterosexual films than on supporting young queer auteurs. Alexis Langlois has just presented his first feature film in Cannes, about the supercharged destiny of pop diva Mimi Madamour, from her glory to her decline: Queens of Drama turns out to be a high-energy camp gem that exhilarates the viewer.
Alexis Langlois revels in the grotesque and carries his “faggoty, queer, plebeian” identity like a flag, favoring mayhem, immoderation, a joyful pink and candied chaos. Flippancy and parody define a formal manifesto that deconstructs cis-gender, virile and discriminatory mechanics. The tussle is a joyful one, the rumble a party. Far from realism, we slip into a new strange dimension, somewhere between Gregg Arraki and Brian Yuzna. Thus, at just 25, Alexis Langlois follows the path traced by Yann Gonzalez - who admires his work - but set in the contemporaneity of social networks and smartphones, where botoxed monsters and modified bodies ironically replace those shown by Universal studios. Like a Freaks 2.0 of sorts.
With his love of actresses worthy of Almodóvar, Alexis Langlois makes camp a profession of faith, blending references from Buffy to John Waters. When asked about kitsch in his films, he doesn't define it as a guilty pleasure: he assumes finding beauty in the glitters of Disco or 80s aesthetics, burlesque, grimacing faces, excess, or the monstrosities of cosmetic surgery. He believes true bad taste lies more in the hypocrisies of squeamishness and propriety. Immersing in vulgarity and infamy means forsaking rules and limits. Driven by the raging impulses of fantasies and dreams, the Alexis Langlois galaxy exorcizes fears of social and sexual rejection in an essential aesthetic assault.