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A Slightly Pregnant Man
(L’Evénement le plus important depuis que l’homme a marché sur la lune)

Directed by Jacques Demy.
With Catherine Deneuve, Marcello Mastroianni, Micheline Presle.
France/Italy, 1973, DCP, color, 94 min.
French with English subtitles.

Demy’s utopian comedy presents Catherine Deneuve still looking like a fairy tale princess and Marcello Mastrioanni—Italian cinema’s icon of cool masculinity—as her sensitive, slightly pregnant boyfriend. The crayon-colored concoction of absurdity and exaggeration remains tethered to Earth by Demy’s sweetly mundane depiction of their working class lives and the characters’ subdued reactions to the unnatural situation. In Demy’s playful speculation of what could happen in such an upside-down world, basically, everyone handles it fairly well. For better or worse, the surprising phenomenon is immediately incorporated into the wider social schema as well as the capitalist imperative—a maternity clothing company the first to see profit potential. Good natured depictions of men suddenly frantic about birth control, healthcare and the rights of their bodies make way for their understanding women a little bit more while women are amused and enlightened by seeing funny reflections of themselves.

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