It's been done before, but rarely if ever so well: a guy deserving of a comeuppance about gender privileges gets his situation inverted and has to cope with what women have to deal with, and learns some lessons.
What makes Eléonore Pourriat's I Am Not an Easy Man outstanding is that it goes far beyond the thought-experiment level and delves into the subtle nuances of gender polarization and how we cope with them, and it includes that subtle treatment in its portrayal of how the main male character, Damien (portrayed by Pierre Benezit), copes with being dumped into the inverted world.
The 1991 movie Switch, featuring Ellen Barkin, is the kind of fare I'm more used to seeing in this genre: the chauvinist male wakes up abruptly transformed to female, freaks out, and spends the first half of the movie trying to wrench reality back to how it oughta be by force of sheer denial. A whole lot of sight gags to point out how funny and inappropriate it looks when a woman (or person who appears to everyone to be a woman) behaves the way men typically do. A main character whose initial horror gives way to some clever ideas about how this could actually work to his advantage, only to find that any beliefs he'd ever harbored about how this or that would be so much easier if he were a woman are actually all wrong or that it doesn't work the way he'd expected. Very binary and overstated gender expectations and behaviors abound, caricatured in order to be sure to drive the point home. And then — usually around the halfway mark in the movie — acceptance, with the main character getting with the program and adjusting to the situation by becoming a good girl and, whether it's because biology is destiny or because you can't fight city hall (or a universally gendered world), becoming obedient to the new set of expectations and demands.
That's admittedly not entirely fair to Switch but it's a good overview of how I felt about it when I saw it on the screen. Great premise, disappointing for all that it didn't attempt to do.
I Am Not an Easy Man starts off with what looks like the same trajectory. It uses the more difficult inversion of having the man remain a man but finding himself transferred abruptly into world where everyone else is gender inverted, making him the exceptional case. (This means that instead of one actor giving us inverted gender behavior, everyone else in the entire cast is doing so). But again, Damien starts off trying to be who he has always been, while staring around in disbelief and becoming shocked and dismayed.
But after awhile he gets it, just as we in the audience do, although he remains mystified (of course) about how this could have happened. And he begins to adjust.
Some of the adjustment is opportunistic: some things weren't available to him in his familiar world, or weren't possibilities he'd ever considered for himself, but we watch him consider and them avail himself of them and they generally work for him. He learns to dress attractively, develops closer and more intimate emotional-content-sharing same-sex friendships, and finds televised dramas (with gender patterns aligned with this new world he's in of course) to be moving and cathartic.
Some of the adjustment is merely expedient: if he wants to date, and the women find his unmodified hairy chest to be a dealbreaker, he's going to have to wax. Well, if that's the way it is, it isn't pleasant but it isn't worth the price tag to balk at it.
And there are ways in which he doesn't conform but decides to fight back. A world in which people of his gender are dismissed as non-serious people? That's a dealbreaker for him. The unfairness, the inequality, this is intolerable. So he joins the masculinists and attends support groups and marches and rallies with his brethren.
The core of the story revolves around his relationship with writer Alexandra (Marie-Sophie Ferdane). Damien has a lifetime history of approaching women with the sexually enthusiastic and forward behaviors that work for him in his native world. In this new world, obtaining access to sexual activity isn't difficult—he gets propositioned (not to mention catcalled on the street and stared at by random women as a visual treat when walking through the business office) and he does partake. When his parents (same people, now gender-inverted) express a bit too much concern about him ever finding a suitable relationship, he flings into their face the fact that he has sex with many women, as readily as they do, and scarcely remembers their name, it's as fleeting and transient a delight for him as for them, and not a reason to settle down.
But therein lies the problem. Once he does meet someone (Alexandra) with whom he wants more, wants the relationship he has with her to continue, now it starts to matter strategically that he's in a world where expressing that is going to be tricky. This is a world where the male folks pursue the ongoing relationships and it's the female ones who tend to fuck-and-discard, so trying to hold on to what he's got with her runs the risk of coming across as clingy and vulnerable. And so we watch as he discovers firsthand the careful balance of wanting passion and sex but needing to protect himself from being regarded and treated as a mere outlet. Of not being sufficiently respected and valued.
Alexandra has her own arc of understanding-growth. In a nod to a classic cliché (see Roman Holiday), she starts off pretending and manipulating, while keeping her real agenda, of cashing in on the experience by writing about it, hidden; but then gradually falls in love with her subject Damien, and bails on the planned betrayal but the clues to what she's done are available to Damien who discovers them and decides she's a horrid cad who never cared for him. So just as Alexandra is regretting any intention of hurting Damien, Damien comes to see her as a callous and cruel person and she's suddenly at risk of losing him just as she realizes she absolutely can't let that happen. It's been done before but seldom with the bad girl becoming undone this way.
Ferdane is suave and confident and walks a good balance between arrogant and sensitive, between tough and broodingly lonely. She's not butch in a Joe-the-plumber way (in fact, we get a painter complete with plumber's crack just for the juxtaposition) so much as she's Bogart or James Dean. We want to get to her, evoke her human side, care for her.
I Am Not an Easy Man is delightful in its exquisite attention to detail and the believability of its inverted depictions. It would be easy to stick in a male erotic dancer that would prompt a giggle and a nod about sexual visual objectification, but it takes more skill to present us with a believable male pole dancer that you could readily imagine as delicious eye candy to bar patrons. And comedians from Roseanne Barr to Amy Schumer have done up the belching, open-legged, stained-shirt unself-conscious leering men shtick. But in the poker scene in this movie it doesn't come across as caricature. You believe the women around the table are real. The nuances of posture and facial expression and gesture are spot-on. And as a result, it hits harder.
Having mentioned Switch, I'll make note of a couple other gender-inverty offerings to flesh out the backdrop. There have been pieces that are done with serious intent, as illustrations of gender polarization and not just for the burlesque value of inversion as entertainment. Ella Fields became a YouTube / Facebook sensation when she gave us this one last year, for instance. When our 13 year olds still feel that they are up against this kind of rigid sex role expectation system, it's powerful to see it expressed in this kind of thought experiment; six and a half minutes doesn't give one room to explore the complex nuances though, and unfortunately some people rejected its message because they considered it overstated and that it ignored how things aren't actually so rigid in the modern world.
Not all depictions of gender reversal contain a lot of sympathy for critics of existing gender polarization. If (as I implied) some of the plot trajectories seem to end up promoting gender conformity even after doing a sendup of pompous (male) privileged certainties, there are also tales of gender inversion that never move beyond dismay and a conveyed sense of male humiliation except when someone manages to revert things to their natural state. I remember plucking a copy of Regiment of Women from the paperback stand when I was in High School and giving myself a headache from so much eye-rolling.
I Am Not an Easy Man is available on Netflix as an original Netflix movie.
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