The 8 inspirations of Drama Queens: Britney Spears, Buffy, A Star is Born…

Star of queer short films, her move to feature length with Les Reines du drama lives up to expectations that are already high. Langlois details the split inspirations of this UFO mixing Britney with Fassbinder and drag with Judy Garland.

Alexis Langlois is far from being a rubbish. In ten years and four short films, his gesture has already been amply established, building a solid reputation with a relatively initiated audience, that of short film festivals, extended to a slightly wider spectrum since his last two, which are – something rare – released in theaters. His first feature, Drama Queenswas therefore more than expected by what we can already call a community of fans, long-held by its queer cinema, produced in groups, often funny, very raw, subversive, sometimes almost insurrectional, and bearing the mark of a cinephilia ranging from John Waters to Gregg Araki via George Cukor.

The film is an unclassifiable musical narrating the rise and fall lovers of two imaginary pop (Mimi Madamour, played by Louiza Aura) and punk (Billie Kohler, played by Gio Ventura) icons, whose songs, clips, and TV appearances Langlois invents, under the devouring eye of a transfixed fan transformed into a narrator-youtuber (Bilal Hassani). A non-binary filmmaker, he guides us into the depths of this great network of visions.

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1. Britney Spears

She is the most obvious inspiration for the character of Mimi Madamour, the candy pink nymphet hiding her lesbianism. “Britney embodies better than anyone the idea of ​​the wounded icon and the duality of the relationship between her fans and the media, between adoration and sacrifice. » Both are also television fabrications (the Mickey Mouse Club for Britney and a Popstars-style telecast for Mimi) demolished by a nauseating double injunction to be both model little girls and sex symbols. Langlois reproduced in his film several key scenes from the myth, and more precisely from its second part, the fall: the inconsolable fan begging to leave her alone, the shaving of the head… “But there are also several French icons in Mimi, like Lorie or Priscilla, thrown into the same trap. » We must save the starlets.

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2. The right of the strongest

The great queer filmmakers are always troop leaders: John Waters and Gregg Araki, “which are necessarily there a little when I write, although less on this one”but also Fassbinder, whose little-known 1975 film is dear to Langlois for its Marxist dimension. “It’s the story of an unemployed young man who becomes the lover of a richer man, who will ultimately use and rob him. » Determinisms more discreetly at work, but nevertheless present in The Queens of drama, “where Mimi and Billie can't really love each other because of their social differences. I like to film the community, I'm not saying it doesn't exist, but the class is stronger. Fassbinder's film says there is no queer solidarity.

3. Buffy the Vampire Slayer

“Buffy, these are my first emotions. » It was by tinkering with films or bits of scenes with his sister Justine (who appears in most of his films) and a camcorder that Langlois learned the basics of cinema as a teenager. Several sueded imitations of scenes from Buffy came out of these years of learning. “There is this pleasure of craftsmanship, and there is above all, of course, the theme of the monster, which is always an allegory of adolescence, a way of dealing with anxiety in the first degree. But also the whole question of artifice and belief: I like transforming an actress, putting fantastic makeup on her, playing at becoming something else. » As progress Drama Queensthe pangs of age and notoriety hang on the skin like stigmata of silicone.

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4. A star is born

Why the Cukor version? “Because Judy Garland forever. » If this myth remade a hundred times (okay, three times) is the manifest model of the structure in rise and fall reputation of Drama queensit didn't just affect his narrative. “We also, with cinematographer Marine Atlan, looked a lot for something in terms of image, like a meeting point of Technicolor from the 50s and TV from the 2000s.” But it is obviously the question of celebrity as an eternal repetition of cycles of destruction which links the two films. “It was also represented in a very literal way with the scenes from the wheel of fortune. » Cukor would have liked to have had the idea, but debilitating TV games had not yet been invented in 1954.

5. Queer Night
It was in an LGBT party and in particular in the emblematic Souffleuses club in the Marais that Langlois met Dustin Muchuvitz, Raya Martigny, Nana Benamer and the entire troupe of trans actresses who have accompanied him since his beginnings. “It’s a world that is funny, unrealistic, dramatic. We meet a few movie characters there, but who are also real people. There is this tension of truth and falsehood which interests me very much. » A world carefully reconstructed in his first produced short film, Trifles and dark thoughts (2016), a striking foray into an uncensored afterparty, and where they downright believe they have “learned a lot more things than at university”. Did you know that we gave courses on sensitometry in a box?

6. Pino Donaggio

“It’s one of the references that we gave to Pierre Desprats, the composer of the music, thinking in particular of his score for Double Bodysuit. » Pino Donaggio is perhaps the best incarnation of the link between De Palma's Hitchcockian fetishism and his eighties tropism, notable in the image but just as striking in the music: “He has both a real connection to Bernard Herrmann, to his lyrical classicism, but also obviously to electro, notably with the emblematic scene on Relax by Frankie Goes to Hollywood even if the piece is not written by him. » Drama Queens combines amplified tubes and orchestral pieces in the same way, with a taste for baroque overload but a permanent concern for fluidity.

7. Sexy Sushi

It's a little more than the main inspiration for Billie Kohler's character, since Rebeka Warrior, half of the electroclash tandem Sexy Sushi, is also co-author of the music of Drama queens. With Langlois, she tried to rediscover the texture of her beginnings: “Music that was the first to talk about us, that was queer and punk, even if that means everything and nothing, and at the same time that conquered well beyond with something both funny and venerating. Lots of straight guys were listening and didn't know she was a dyke. » The paradoxes of the notion of “indie hit” are at the heart of the film, which plays on the duality between commercial music and subversive counterculture, a relationship mixed with rivalry and mutual inspirations, which is superimposed on the love story

8. Judy Holliday

“She’s my favorite actress. She is surprisingly little loved in France. I heard that she was Deneuve's favorite actress, which would be intriguing since she's a bit of her opposite: a pure actress of composition, overflowing with energy, not at all a statue. » Langlois sees in Cukor's favorite actress an avant-garde of self-transformation, as in A thunderous numbere, where she plays a telephone operator switching from one voice to another to take on different identities; but also from the influence market with a film like A woman who appears : “She's an unemployed model who rents a billboard to display her name, with nothing to sell but herself. » A TikToker before her time.

Drama Queens: “This film says: 'Let's try to create a connection, some sweetness.'”