When Lucien (Jérémy Gillet) threatens to be lost in the crowd in “Jim Queen,” visiting the gay nightclub PowerBoyz that might as well be an arena with the throngs of people there that he doesn’t know, a drag queen named Glaymdia (Harald Marlot) takes pity on the lost soul and offers a primer on who’s who in every corner of the disco, much like Cher once did for Tai in “Clueless.” It’s a funny bit on its own as Glamydia points out the burly bears (actual grizzlies when this is an animated fantasy), the gym rats and the fetishists, all proudly gay but there at PowerBoyz for distinctly different reasons and as they party in a variety of ways in a place of inclusion they’ve spent years subtly working towards such a peace, it seems as if directors Nicolas Athané and Marco Nguyen have somehow managed the same feat with the broadly appealing comedy that like many of its characters leads with its brawny and outrageous visage but is surprisingly tender and thoughtful underneath.
Lucien, the timid son of France’s health minister Christine Byer (Elisabeth Wiener), is at Powerboyz to defy his mother with a rare public outing, usually locked away in the corner of the castle-like compound that they share due to Christine’s position and while she keeps her son firmly under her thumb, she doesn’t pay enough attention to notice the stockade of sex toys he’s built up to keep himself entertained. Despite buying buttplugs, however, Lucien has an exceptionally gentle spirit, which contrasts greatly with his idol Jim Perfect (Alex Ramirès), a buff influencer he can keep track of from afar with his fitness videos from Temple Gym. The two end up running into each other at Powerboyz where Jim is set to compete in a competition at the end of the night with Pavel, another powerlifter like himself, yet Jim is felled by a mysterious illness take begins to make his formerly impressive abs disappear one by one, soon learning that it is symptomatic of heterotosis, a virus that could wipe out the gay population by making them straight.
This leads to a compelling personal crisis for Jim when he has staked his entire identity on being toned and tanned and Lucien, not being part of the scene and basically everything that Jim is not, can become a compassionate confidant. Yet when the two meet for a Powerboyz post-mortem at a restaurant called Flush where the slop on the plates literally looks like feces, indicative of the gleefully poor taste Athane and Nguyen indulge in throughout, it is all the more unexpected that “Jim Queen” starts to exude an urgency on par with another film that made quite a splash at Cannes a decade prior in Robin Campillo’s “120 BPM,” charting how ACT UP Paris rose during the AIDS crisis to confront an extinction-level event. In cartoon form, Athané and Nguyen can imagine a much grander battle against armageddon without regard to budget and use the exaggeration of hand drawings not only for humor, but to show the marked differences between the different factions of the LGBTQ community that Lucien and Jim end up having to corral, alongside Jim’s party buddy and physician Nina (Shirley Souagnon), to recognize how dire the threat really is and the need to fight back, particularly as it starts to look like the virus may have been actually manufactured by someone to wipe out the gay population.
Making coalition-building look fun yet no less difficult than it actually is when following Lucien and Jim to back alley BDSM clubs and far more mellow hangouts like the Bear’s Den is no small achievement, and the film starts to take on its own momentum as a rousing call to action after all its early energy is generated by Athané and Nguyen’s fast and funny script, a boisterous techno score from the French composing outfit Kirosen and the colorful visuals that don’t neglect to show the marginalization of a community made to feel like second class citizens in slightly dilapidated clinics and clubs if you look hard enough but favors the splendor with which they choose to see their lives. “Jim Queen” may be one of the silliest films to hit the Croisette this year, but also one that most deserves to be taken seriously.
“Jim Queen” will screen again at Cannes on May 18th at 5:45 pm at Le Cineum IMAX and May 19th at 4:45 pm at Le Cineum Screen X.