Le Mari de la coiffeuse I like it!

                   
The film begins in a flashback from the titular character, Antoine. We are introduced to his fixation with female hairdressers which began at a young age. The film uses flashbacks throughout and there are frequent parallels drawn with the past. Though Antoine tells Mathilde that 'the past is dead', his life is evidence that on some level the past repeats itself. As a young boy he fantasised about a hairdresser who committed suicide and as a man in his 50s he begins an affair with a hairdresser which ends after ten years in her suicide. However there are differences, Mathilde commits suicide because she is so happy she is afraid of the happiness she has found with Antoine ending.We are unsure what Antoine has done with his life; we know, however, that he has fulfilled his childhood ambition: to marry a haidresser. The reality proves to be every bit as wonderful as the fantasy and the two enjoy an enigmatic, enclosed and enchanting relationship. The final sequence shows Antoine, in the salon, dancing to Eastern music just as he has done throughout his life. His last line is the enigmatic comment that the hairdresser will return.The film is awesome in how it begins, how it continues, and how it ends. It is profound.

It is about our foolish dreams. I doubt it has ever found a single viewer who yearns to be a hairdresser's husband, but it allows us all to understand such a thing is quite possible. He isn't a hair fetishist. He is a hairdresser fetishist. Leconte shows us the very moment when he was seized by his desire. His young eyes are wide and solemn as he glimpses in a gap in another hairdresser's blouse that form we all learn, as our first lesson, is the source of all goodness, love and comfort: a woman's breast. He is lost.Not only lost, but mad. There is no sanity in his intense focus. Is she mad? She must be. But they're both so happy. Real life hardly seems to be a factor. We never see them eat. We never see them sleep. We know they live in a room above the shop, but we don't see it.Their days pass in a serene parade, sometimes enlivened by his fondness for dancing to recordings of the music of "The Arabian Nights." He can't dance, as he is the first to admit. But what he does is wonderful, and Rochefort's gyrations, always with a solemn face, are very funny. Why this music? Why this dance? Why do we need to ask?