Life is kinder to attractive, powerful men than it is to regular guys. This is the case of Cédric (Patrick Hivon), an engineer in his early forties, handsome and clean about him, who has never asked himself too many questions about his behavior towards women… until the day he steals a kiss journalist Chantal Tremblay (Ève Duranceau) live on TV. While his friends Carlos (Stéphane Moukarzel) and Tessier (Hubert Proulx) are delighted to see the clip “J’t’aime Chantal! “to go viral, his boss (Nathalie Breuer) does not intend to laugh.
Cédric learns the hard way that times have changed and that small gestures that were thought innocent are now considered reprehensible. Having lost his job, Cédric comes up against the indifference of his wife Nadine (Monia Chokri), who already has to deal with her postpartum depression. Unable to sleep awake all night since the birth of their daughter, the mother on the verge of a nervous breakdown announces that she is returning to work.
While chatting with her brother Jean-Michel (Steve Laplante), journalist and self-proclaimed feminist — beware of those! —, Cédric undertakes to write a letter of apology to Chantal Tremblay in the form of a book. Sexist Story, suggests the title Amy (Nadia Tereszkiewcz), a new nanny who has magically appeared in the couple’s life. Thanks to his contacts in the industry, Jean-Michel finds a publisher (Patrice Dubois, who seems to come straight out of a film by Lynch or Kubrick), who immediately smells a good deal.
Created in 2017, shortly before the #MeToo movement took off around the world, the piece Baby sitter by Catherine Léger, screenwriter of Charlotte has fun, by Sophie Lorain, gently twisted relationships of domination, sexual stereotypes and the principle of double standards. In the hands of Monia Chokri, the visionary play, slightly reworked up to date by the playwright herself, takes on a grittier and more audacious turn. Largely thanks to the aesthetic choices of the filmmaker, which will leave some dumbfounded, others dumbfounded.
Crossed looks
Driven by dialogues that happily challenge sexual stereotypes, Baby sitter won’t leave anyone indifferent by the way Monia Chokri and the director of photography Josée Deshaies, faithful accomplice of Denis Côté (Curling) and Bertrand Bonnelo (Saint Laurent), to criticize, even to ridicule, the “ male gauze (male gaze).
Inspired by the erotic films of the 1970s by Just Jaeckin and David Hamilton, the era of vaseline-coated lenses and the codes of the giallo, they make the baby sitter sometimes solar, sometimes sulphurous, sometimes fairy, sometimes witch. Under the dumbfounded gaze of Nadine, Cédric and Jean-Michel, Amy will even put on a maid costume to make Buñuel damn. In several scenes, the female bodies, often deprived of a face or a head, are fragmented to the point of causing discomfort: here, a haughty chest that covers half of the screen; there, a rounded rump as a vanishing point.
Much less wise than for his first feature film, My brother’s wife, Monia Chokri enjoys revisiting the fairy tale, moving away from the chaste pink of Disney to embrace the scoundrel red of the Brothers Grimm, crushing this eternal promise made to little girls stuffed with princess stories, “and they lived happily ever after. at the end of time”, with scenes alternately wacky, naughty and ferocious. With the risk of eclipsing the finesse of Catherine Léger’s reflection.
Then comes this pursuit in a disenchanted forest, the most powerful sequence of Baby sitter, where the roles are reversed, where the wolf becomes the vulnerable prey of a voracious Little Red Riding Hood. The scene alone justifies all the fantasy that Monia Chokri wanted to bring to this comedy of manners with an offbeat tone, where everyone delivers their score perfectly.