La Moustache

Cinema Guild | Release Date: May 24, 2006

6.6	USER SCORE Generally favorable reviews based on 14 Ratings

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RenovatiaOct 12, 2016

This review contains spoilers, click expand to view. Hello viewer. I watched this movie as it was tagged with "Mystery" amongst others. I like mystery, and don't mind additional tags such as "drama" at all. I regret watching it - wasting time. I'll explain in a moment.

First the facts. The movie is about a man in his mid-life years who shaves off his mustache, yet nobody notices the difference. In fact, everybody claims he didn't have a mustache for the past 15 years. Even though we see physical evidence such as recent pictures. We even see him shaving off his mustache. From here on our star sinks into a life of confusion and mental agony.

I can't help revealing the end to outline the criticism I have. The end basically leaves us in an ambiguous state. Was it all real? Is he going crazy, first signs of Alzheimer, mid-life crisis? We do not receive any answers and that is absolutely unforgivable. Because a potential "big reveal" is all the movie had going for.

The pace is slow - to end up with nothing. With that I mean that much of the time spent is for our star to ask around if they notice any difference. We got the message after twenty minutes, but it kept dragging on. This movie could have been easily shortened by fifty percent, and it still would have retained its main narrative of ambiguity.

So there it is, one sits through this slow movie only to be left with zero answers. The plot is that you have to make up your own reasons. I'm sorry but that will simply not do.

I have two good things to say about the movie. First being the music. Philip Morris Glas' nihilistic classic music is really nice if you like classic music. For this movie it reminded me a bit of Vivaldi's "Spring". Whilst liking this, one may complain that it's too heavy, and the complaint might be justified indeed. The second thing I appreciate is the decent camera-job. The budget was "only" about five million Euros, yet we were not treated with shaky handycam like so many low-ish budget films do. Lighting, angles, lenses, it all was more or less OK. Meaning, watching the movie was mostly easy on the eye.

For the good things, I rated the movie three stars. The lack of context and answers truly infuriated me. It's not that I desperately need answers, but I have been given absolutely nothing. For example John Carpenters' "The Thing" leaves us in an ambiguous state of the fate of the two survivors. But the ending is satisfying nevertheless because no matter what, those two are in deep trouble. Also, what happened wasn't their imagination, it all was real. So no mystery there. Such context was not the case with "La Moustache".

Sorry to be this negative, but the truth is, I think, that this movie was a standard project to bait the kind of critics who love "deep" movies. And it worked; for example it won the Directors' Fortnight Award. It's not much, but that's how the game works.… Expand

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SteveBJan 3, 2008

Shades of Fellini, but not quite so frustrating. La Moustache is definitely no nonentity, nor is it memorable. It was an admirable project with some good moments. Stick it out and you will appreciate a picture about a couple experiencing a Shades of Fellini, but not quite so frustrating. La Moustache is definitely no nonentity, nor is it memorable. It was an admirable project with some good moments. Stick it out and you will appreciate a picture about a couple experiencing a strange hallucinatory moment in their marriage. Hollywood could use a lesson here.… Expand