In a language where ‘genre’ means both gender and genre, to queer one is to queer the other. From avant-garde to the huis-clos polar, 8 Femmes toys with all forms that cross its path before discarding them. In this dollhouse, to be a woman is to perform in a collapsing theatre of attitudes. Any emotional excess is tested by camp, the Sirkian heroine is wed to the femme fatale, and the whodunnit is problematised by the melodrama. Ozon’s film operates through a distinctly queer affect that defies linearity and normative storytelling as its storylines stretch from the lows of melodrama to the heights of classical tragedy. ‘Camp sees everything in quotation marks’ writes Sontag ‘not a woman, but a “woman.” Actors playing characters who play gender in order to play genre, in hopes of breaking free. Performances that navigate the pre/inter/meta-textual unruliness of eight women and all cinematic baggage they carry with them.

In the beginning, the eight of them will try to assume the teleological role of the father: to find out who killed him, to condemn Pierrette for her profession, to reprimand Mme Chanel for her love for Pierrette. But as each character unfurls, the structure begins to crumble. Their 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 couldn’t be otherwise articulated.

Genre is revealed as a mere a frame of overflowing narratives and this is Ozon’s achievement. The patriarchal mode of storytelling has been overwritten by its shadow. 8 Femmes knows, for instance, there is something inherently comical about the stiff body in the library, dramatically contorted in death. It knows there is pleasure in the gazes exchanged by two women pretending to loathe one another. It knows that the songs we choose to sing ourselves reveal more about us than we’d be willing to admit. What is at stake here, is the representation 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 a hundred times before 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?

8 Femmes
François Ozon
2002

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