The King of Escape might be Guiraudie’s most accessible work to date. In broad outline, its tale of Armand, a middle-aged, big-bellied gay man, being pursued amorously by an attractive teenaged girl named Curly sounds like an eccentric romantic comedy. While there’s plenty of humor, it derives not from courtship but from randy desire and polymorphous perversity. The King of Escape’s oscillation between erotic utopia and a dystopia of patriarchy and state surveillance ultimately makes it less a farce than a kind of political fairy tale, complete with love potions. Guiraudie’s ultimate irony is that what brings the law down on Armand is not his cruising the woods for sex with men – after all, everyone knows he’s gay – but instead his unexpected deviation from that normalized identity.