Madame

Madame, that’s Caroline. A flamboyant 90 year-old grandmother who immediately makes it clear that there is more to her than just a coquettish hairstyle and bourgeois manners. The focal point of the movie is the relationship with her grandson, filmmaker Stéphane Riethauser. Madame is a double self-portrait, in which the matriarch and her gay grandson confide in each other. With humour but in a profound manner and with subversive force, the film deconstructs gender stereotypes and illustrates the saga of a middle-class family with marvellous archive pictures. Stéphane Riethauser shows his intense life journey: the reluctance to live out his homosexuality openly, the imposition of patriarchal gender roles, and the effort to reverse them in one’s personal, family and social life.