A new French animated film for adult audiences, "Jim Queen," follows Jim Perfect, a gym obsessive nicknamed the queen of the gym, after he is infected with a fictional virus called heterosis that turns homosexual men heterosexual.
The infection shows itself gradually. First Jim starts hiding one of his abdominal muscles, then another, then another. He stops paying attention to his physique and develops a belly, and eventually reaches the point of finally understanding the offside rule in football, a knowing joke about stereotypical straight masculinity.
The film is described as a gamberrada, a mischievous, riotous romp that is also very gay and very funny. It is naive in places, with a six-pack drawn in a style its own writer compares to a child's doodle, and irreverent almost everywhere else. That mix, according to its makers, is the whole point of the joke.
A film for everyone, not just gay audiences
Being very gay does not mean the film is only for gay viewers, according to its screenwriter, Simon Balteaux. He said that although "Jim Queen" was originally conceived as a joke aimed at a gay audience, it ended up becoming a broader story meant for everyone to watch, especially straight viewers. The film is suitable for all audiences except children and homophobes, for obvious reasons.
"Jim Queen" was directed by Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athane. Balteaux said the film mocks everyone equally, straight people, gay people and queer people in general, which raises the question of who might take the most offence. He said he hopes the answer is no one, because the film is a joke in which its makers laugh at themselves first.
From an inside joke to a political statement
Balteaux said the project did not start out with any political intention. The first idea, he explained, was to spotlight gay life through a satire that flipped the usual roles, and jokes about straight people began to emerge, though at first they were fairly silly. The team realised those jokes touched on interesting social questions, he said, even though the project still felt largely innocent.
Years passed before the film's release, and Balteaux said he was confronted with reality when Senegal passed a law to repress homosexuality. He said that overnight, the naive jokes the team had written became political.
The villain and her son
Asked about the film's antagonist, Christine Bayer, Balteaux described a character built from two real-world references. Her son, Lucien, is a repressed gay man whom his mother tries to "convert." Balteaux said Bayer is a mix of a former French health minister who opposed same-sex marriage and the pharmaceutical company Bayer, a name previously linked to a contaminated blood scandal involving HIV in France.
He said the character loves her son deeply, but not in the right way, since she refuses to accept him as he is.
Critical reception
La Razón published its own review of "Jim Queen" alongside the interview, awarding the film three stars under the headline "against the heterosexual dictatorship."
