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Cahiers explain
🕑 Added 2021-02-13 03:41:36 +0000 UTC
the presence of Sophie Letourneur's Enormous on your 2020 top ten. I just tried watching it and had to bail after 25 minutes. Not only is the film hyper-aggressive in its assertion that certain things are funny, when in fact they're just annoying. It is also so ethically backward as to suggest Letourneur is making a principled stand against feminism.
Claire (Marina Foïs) is one of the greatest concert pianists in the world. Her shyness and occasional stage fright in no way hampers her effortless mastery of Chopin. Her comic-lout husband Fred (Jonathan Cohen) is her booker and manager. He talks over Claire, answers any questions people may have for her, and generally turns care-giving into an exercise in swaggering, unnecessary chivalry. For his trouble -- for being a man "progressive" enough to live in the shadow of his talented wife -- he decides to tamper with her birth control and knock her up without her knowledge or permission.
If Letourneur's point is that no man, however ostensibly liberal, can be supportive of a woman's success and must sabotage it, this is a specious argument, but one that can be understood within a certain feminist framework -- that men, despite our best efforts, are incapable of performing emotional labor without exacting a toll. However, it seems almost as if Enormous thinks that Fred's deception is warranted, because being a father is his rightful prize for being a male "wife."
I'm disgusted.
