La Cage aux Folles

Renato runs a nightclub in Saint-Tropez. Albin, his partner of many years, is the club's star performer and appears on stage in drag. Renato's son announces he is getting married; the girl's father is a politician who campaigns on morality, and the family is coming to meet them. For one evening everything in the house has to be hidden. The subject is not sexuality but who gets hurt by a performance kept up in order to look respectable. At the film's centre is Albin being moved out of his own home; the comedy continues while the wound stays real, and the film does not resolve it with a joke. The form comes from the theatre and plays that way. Fast talk, frequent entrances and exits, absurdity generated by situation. Michel Serrault's performance carries it: extravagant and completely defenceless. The production was an unexpectedly large success. It ran for a long time outside France and held the American box office record for a foreign-language film for years. It received three Oscar nominations. It was remade in America in 1996 as The Birdcage. Ugo Tognazzi plays Renato. Édouard Molinaro directs. Who it is for: viewers who like classic French comedy. Who it is not for: anyone who will find some of the period's conventions uncomfortable now; at times the film both defends and ridicules the same types.