In 8 Femmes to be a woman is to be of affect, of artifice, of the romance novel, of the dollhouse, and—most prominently here—of the screen. It is a collapsing theatre of attitudes—one acted out by its most fantastic performers. In revealing gender as a plastic convention rather than a biologically self-fulfilling prophecy, Ozon exposes genre itself as nothing but mere framing of overflowing narratives. And so 8 Femmes erupts in a myriad of rhythms and melodies digressing in all directions, and stretching from the ‘lows’ of melodrama to the highs of classical tragedy. It is a feminine and queer aesthetic, one propelled by complication rather than resolution, of a heterosexual world observed from within the closet of sexuality and gender. And for those who view the world from such a keyhole, all that is expected of them once they exit, is performance.
Performance then, to navigate the pre-, inter-, and meta-textual unruliness of eight women and all cinematic baggage they carry with their names. ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks’ writes Sontag ‘not a woman, but a “woman.” Women as actors, who are in turn ‘women’ playing gender, in order to play genre, in hopes of breaking free. In the beginning they will try and assume the teleological role of the father: to find out who killed him, to condemn Pierrette for her profession, to reprimand Mme Chanel and her love for Pierrette.
But as each characters’ thoughts are revealed their performances of patriarchal structures start crumbling. These revelations are adorned with 60s and 70s French pop (of yet another eight women whose voices carry their own queer connotations) converting the procedural into the frivolous and enlightening the frivolous with all that cannot be expressed otherwise. Women realising with an almost innocent awkwardness, that they have been woven onto a tapestry of communal perception and fascination.
In the end, what Ozon achieves is queer satisfaction. And the delight that emerges in queering genre/gender far surpasses momentary sexual representation. At its most rewarding, it is an overwriting of the patriarchal mode of storytelling in order for its shadow-self to surface. And Ozon knows this. He knows there is something inherently funny about the stiff body in the library, dramatically contorted in death. He knows there is pleasure in the gazes exchanged by two women pretending to loathe one another. He knows that the songs we choose to sing ourselves reveal more about us than we’d like to admit. All this to say, the queer screen is not solely concerned with producing a bouquet of sexual preferences and experiences. What is at stake here, is the presentation of the very narratives that have long now been coded and concealed in fear of disturbance.
The eight women stand shoulder to shoulder, locking hands as if ready to take a bow. The director yells cut as he has done before a hundred times but the camera lingers. In this very moment, as the suspended lights start fading, what do these women do? Where do they go? Who do they become?