At the utterance of the title during an editorial meeting, a colleague exclaimed: “I would make it my drag queen name. » Fact, Medusa Deluxe will fall, if it ever lands on a major streaming platform, in the category of queer films, because a good part of the characters are gay, because we hear disco and the author plays these codes. For the moment, Thomas Hardiman’s first feature film has found asylum on Mubi, a cinephile platform, which highlights the formal virtuosity of this unexpected hybrid. The scenario of Medusa Deluxe obeys both the rules of the mystery novel (the story begins after the discovery of a corpse) and the morning extravagance of sordidness that befits the setting: a hairdressing contest, somewhere in the north of England.
Fittingly, the victim, one of the hairdressers who was about to compete for the prize, was found scalped, much to the despair of her husband, who was also a trafficker in alopecia treatments. Police cordoned off the contest theatre, one of those multifunctional convention centers made up of endless corridors, deathly cold rooms and boxes desperately trying to be cozy. This is where we review the suspects: the hairdressers and hairdressers who could have eliminated a competitor, the organizer, the security guards…
For this exhibition, as for the development of the plot, Thomas Hardiman, also a screenwriter, resolutely turns his back on the usual procedures – flashbacks, exchanges in shot and reverse shot between investigator and suspect. Medusa Deluxe is one of those films that seems to have been shot in a single sequence shot, as was once The rope (1948), by Alfred Hitchcock. Hardiman takes advantage of the labyrinthine architecture of his setting to disorient and confine characters and spectators. We will never go beyond the forecourt of a building which becomes both a microcosm and a prison.
All it takes is for a door to open as the camera approaches for you to move from the most extreme discomfort to the wonder aroused by the virtuosity of the artists. We reach the summit with this variation on Directoire fashion, which wears a very contemporary young woman’s hair with a striking evocation of the Battle of the Nile which witnessed Admiral Nelson’s triumph over Bonaparte’s fleet.
Apology for ambition
The styles of the hairdressers – neocubist, baroque, naturalist – reflect the personalities of the creators and are therefore so many clues. The audacity and violence of Cleve (Clare Perkins), the gentleness of Divine (Kayla Meikle) advance the investigation, they also form, with their models, a kind of tableau vivant which speaks of the violence of an environment which – like the others – is shaped by the rules of the competition.
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