MOVIE REVIEW : Love Amid the Lotions

In Patrice Leconte’s “The Hairdresser’s Husband” (Edwards South Coast Plaza Village in Santa Ana, Goldwyn Pavilion in West Los Angeles, Fine Arts in Beverly Hills), a little French hairstyling shop becomes a citadel of bliss, and its shampoos, oils, clippers and combs turn into the accouterments of desire.

This comic romance of friseurs and frissons --which is about a man whose only ambition in life is to wed a beautiful hairdresser, and does--is shaped like a fairy tale: a perverse, cracked one. But, though it starts on a roguish once-upon-a-time note, “Hairdresser’s Husband” doesn’t have a happy-ever-after climax. It’s a movie about “perfect happiness,” in which we find that bliss conceals a stinger.

The colors are dreamy and pastel. The scenes are light, brief, buoyant. Watching “Husband,” we’re immersed in a milieu where everything is eroticized, all surfaces sensuous. As the camera--which Leconte, untypically enough, operates himself--glides over the tiny shop, bathed in its creamy, otherworldly light, we keep hearing the delicate slap of the coiffeuse’s fingers on the faces of her clients. Leconte is giving vent to fantasy, and he fully indulges it.

The hairdresser’s husband, Antoine (played by the sublimely dotty Jean Rochefort), is a man whose entire life is reduced to a fetish. As a 12-year-old boy, he fell wildly in love with a bosomy, unbuttoned hairdresser who gave him a memorable haircut. Later, past 40, he discovers Mathilde (Anna Galiena), a shy, lovely, expert coiffeuse who accepts his impulsive marriage proposal and enters immediately into a life of erotic fantasy, endlessly replayed.

It’s a marriage of lascivious stasis, exquisite emptiness--all preparation and no payoff. Antoine hangs around the shop, watches his beloved and her exclusively male clientele. Then, in touches that tip off the dreamlike structure, they make love before unshaded windows, or, in the movie’s most memorable scene, while a drowsy, mind-bogglingly inattentive client is being shaved. There are no children of their own, no work for Antoine. The fetish reigns supreme and time has hit a stop.

But only temporarily. Leconte, known here previously for his Georges Simenon-derived hit “M. Hire,” is a filmmaker who can both summon up incredible pleasures and surround them with a prickling and queasy unease. “Hire” was about erotic obsession too: a little peeping Tom who sacrificed himself for passion. And though “Hairdresser’s Husband” initially seems lighter, more charming and buoyant, it also has that continuous dark edge--and audiences who don’t perceive it may dismiss the film as simply silly: a perfumed trifle, empty of feeling.

As much as Michel Blanc in “Hire,” Rochefort’s Antoine is a man in a self-created trap; Leconte evokes it by contracting the world around him. The story skitters back and forth between the distant and recent past; almost its only locales are the little shops and Antoine’s childhood home--theatrically enclosed sets--and the resort town’s ocean shore. Here, stubbornly, Antoine remains a child, scared of the ocean, of freedom--of the beach that he associates with his itchy woolen trunks and weird sexual sensations, and of the waters that roil ominously.

Leconte has a perfect Hairdresser’s Husband in Rochefort. With his peculiar stork-like bearing and posture, and those glassily glittering eyes, Rochefort makes Antoine a consummate loon and man-child; when he dances the crazy free-form Arabian jigs that are Antoine’s only self-expression, his face goes spookily rhapsodic and empty. Conversely, hairdresser Galiena seems breathtakingly normal: quiet, beautiful, glowing with sense and health, devoting her entire life to satisfying needs, clipping hair even on her wedding day.

Of course, she’s a fantasy figure, which women in the audience may resent, but the film’s strength lies in the fact that it pursues that fantasy all the way to its logical, and terrible, conclusion. “The Hairdresser’s Husband” (Times-rated: Mature, for nudity, sensuality) is an adult fairy-tale-romance, which hits the morning after happy-ever-after. Leconte, with an expertise both charming and frightening, gets you drunk, wakes you up and leaves you there: in his sunny, aromatic trap of hairdressing and Heart’s Desire.

‘The Hairdresser’s Husband’

Jean Rochefort: Antoine

Anna Galiena: Mathilde

Roland Bertin: Antoine’s father

Maurice Chevit: Agopian

A Triton Pictures presentation. Director Patrice Leconte. Producer Thierry De Ganay. Screenplay by Claude Klotz, Leconte. Cinematographer Eduardo Serra. Editor Joelle Hache. Costumes Cecile Magnan. Music Michael Nyman. Art director Ivan Maussion. Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes.

Times-rated: Mature (nudity, sensuality).