Habibi, songs for my friends: life is a cabaret, old friend! (critical)

Two years after Three nights per week, a first feature length fiction film which already opened the doors to the Parisian drag scene, Florent Gouëlou returns with Habibi, songs for my friends, presented in the French Competition at the Champs Elysée Film Festival this year.

Certainly, Florent Gouëlou (which some know better by his stage name, Bleach Habibi) does a lot for ultra-independent cinema, to which this time he is gifting a documentary. Articulated around the portraits of five queensJavel, Sara Forever, Kiara Bolt, Ruby on the Nail and Tuna Mess, the film also aims to tip its hat to the Flèche d’or, hub of underground culture and refuge from the margins, on the fringes .

If social good thinking is indeed at work in this first didactic essay, which opens with marauding and is punctuated, somewhat randomly, it must be said, with moments of soup kitchens or other welcome forms of sharing, this is not the element we retain. What interests, what fascinates, is the wonderfully raw world behind the scenes into which Florent Gouëlou infiltrates us, its underbelly (literally and figuratively), from which he lifts the veil, without modesty but with respect.

With a sense of formalism and artificiality inherent to this universe, Habibi is approached as the parallel montage of performance sequences and times of conceptualization, costume making, rehearsals; all leading to the last Habibi evening “drag and cinema” of the season of The Golden Arrow. Here, the camera looks at the scene head on, deciphers it, dissects it, probes it, as if to emphasize its richness, its depth. Each number presents itself as a memento teeming with cinematographic, musical or pop references, and this little piece of obscure scene thus sees France Gall, Lady Gaga, Michel Fugain, Pedro Almodovar, Thelma et Louise or even Isabelle Adjani rub shoulders, in a form of mixed cultural weaving, and above all, utopian.

An idealistic artistic sincerity, even candid, but counterbalanced by the depth of reflections on identity, which appear as the common thread of the narration. In short, it is the contradictions of drag that Florent Gouëlou observes under the microscope, the rough edges that make up its complexity. Not one of the queens seems to approach their persona in the same way. And ultimately, what is Sara Forever for Matthieu, or Ruby on the Nail for Maxime? Character ? An alter ego? A brand image, infinitely adaptable? Or the possibility of being “totally other than oneself and yet fundamentally oneself” ?

The beauty of the director’s gesture lies in the fact that he does not really seek an answer to these questions, but goes from queens in queensfrom song to song, as if to show that the drag refuses inertia. Habibi, songs for my friends is a “anti Drag Race France” as Gouëlou says, an intimate, political, poignant, and above all funny object, the burlesque inevitably springing from the performances presented. It is therefore appropriate to conclude this paper with a non-exhaustive anthology, out of context, perhaps a little cryptic but no less sincere, of good words that we owe to these queens of the stage: “Plastic is my campaign” ; At “Three years is almost a round number” ; Passing by : “Are there two ‘p’s on topping?” And : “I always work in a mille-feuille”.

By Florent Gouëlou. With Florent Gouëlou/Javel Habibi, Matthieu Barbin/Sara Forever, Maxime Der Nahabédian/Ruby on the Nail… Duration 1h20. Release date unknown.