[Movie] @mgaft1, the review for movie I am not an easy man (2018)

This movie was created by two ladies: the director Éléonore Pourriat and the scriptwriter Ariane Fert and this is certainly shown in general theme, the plot line, and selection of characters.

They created a comedy is what you would call “cute.” It’s about a “what if” scenario where the roles of men and women in a society are exchanged? How would a man react to such a change in his social status and following from it the lack of opportunities? In other words, what if a man will experience all those frustrations and limitation in rights that they impose on women.

The protagonist (or should I say) the main character Damien is a “male chauvinist” as most of the film media calls him. He is a playboy, who lives without a commitment, as he can easily find his way down female pans. In other words, “why buy the cow if u can get the milk for free?” As the timeline in the movie progresses, Damien bumps into a post and gets transferred into an alternative reality where he “gets a taste of his own medicine. ”There, alternate reality has the same people as his reality except that in it women take the dominant role in a society.

Since I will frequently refer to both realities further in my review, I will conditionally call our reality patriarchate while the alternative one as the matriarchate.

For example, in the matriarchate women fight in bars, use obnoxious pickup lines, gather in groups to play poker, make the record of their scores with men, don’t shave their legs, and attempt to impatiently undress a man during sex and then “possess” them with an exaggerated eager, like wild animals. To the contrary, men here are tearful, interested too much in clothes, too concerned with their looks and diet, watch soap operas and take offense at silly things. In other words, in the matriarchate, male acquired all the traits that stereotypically attributed to women and vise versa.
Damien’s love interest Alexandra is just as uncommitted and unreliable as Damien was in the matriarchate. Now Alexandra starts to push him around and even uses the same hypocritical lines as he did while in the patriarchate.

What seems odd though is that the movie creators implemented the reversal of the roles too literally. Rather than model a possible the matriarchate dynamics, the creators simply used a mirror image of the existing in patriarchate stereotypical gender behavior and flipped them around. In the movie, it looks like women play male roles whole men play female roles.

In my opinion, the acceptance of female promiscuity as valor and a female dominant position in decision making within the matriarchate does make sense. However, female’s negligence in appearance and attire, rudeness and bar fights is an unfair exaggeration and, if anything, it degrades women.

Besides, there are certain biological peculiarities that cause women behavior from a purely biological standpoint.

For example, man can run bare-chested on the street not because he has a dominant role in society, but because his chest anatomically is more compact. Assuming a removal of societal stigma, a very flat chested female could have done the same thing. However, if her breasts would have a formidable size, a bare-chested run would be physiologically not comfortable. Similarly, a male urinating position isn’t the expression of their power position in the matriarchate, but only the consequence of the biological structure of their urinary system.

Realizing that those details were fleshed out for the sake of humor, still, they weren’t very funny and at maximum caused a smirk. Although to be honest, French humor, except for physical humor of Louis de Funès, never seemed funny to me. I can see how it is set up, but for me, it isn’t funny enough.

Not following French movies on regular basis, I didn’t know actors in that movie. Purely from typecasting standpoint, though, the director chosen actors well. Alexandra looks surprisingly manly, which in the eyes of a man (well, let’s say in my eyes for sure) doesn’t make her very attractive.

The end of the movie is spoiled imposing a moralizing and edification. Alexandra — the popular book author — abandons her plan of shaming and mocking men, departs from her “female chauvinistic” editor and invests into the relationship with Damien. This plot move is nothing more than a challenge to men, a behavioral pattern that the director of the movie invites them to follow. She as if saying: “See, a woman in the same situation found strength in herself to give up her societally given advantages and offer a man a compromise.” The movie creators expect the same behavior from men in the patriarchate. This is especially noticeable in view of another plot device: Alexandra also bumps her head against the same post and turns out in the reality of patriarchate. Here the movie director attempts to transcend beyond the boundaries of a movie. Damien (and all the male chauvinists, whom he personifies in the reality of the Patriarchate) is challenged to do the same sacrifice in our reality and offer women equal rights.

To tell you the truth, I’d rather not be lead by the hand and much rather make my own conclusion from the flick.

Yet the director sees it the way and has f a full right to do so. Thank God we live in a society that allows free expression. Of course, freedom of expression has nothing to do with the use of TAGs on Steemit. Here is a complete dictatorship. LOL