After watching Gay Sex in the '70s at Toby's suggestion recently (it's streamable on Netflix), I decided I'd start a new desktop film festival dedicated to la moustache.

After the rousing success of my Kurosawa film festival, I launched a couple of others I never mentioned here because they just never got off the ground. One was dedicated to the films of Yasujiro Ozu, which, to be honest, are so voluminous I was just not up to the task of assembling them in any sort of order, and didn't want to leave any important ones out. Once I started looking into it, it seemed a very serious undertaking, and I wasn't sure I could follow through on it just now. I did watch his picturely Story of Floating Weeds (1934), which had some of the best bicycling scenes I've seen since Breaking Away...


I jumped ahead, then, to Late Spring (1949), which is rightly regarded a masterpiece (as are both the original, silent Floating Weeds and Ozu's own remake). Late Spring also has some lovely cycling scenes...


I'm curious to see if the rest of Ozu's oeuvre contains scenes as cyclephilic as these.

What struck me as especially marvelous about Late Spring was how everything in the film was for that perfect, penultimate scene, where he's peeling the apple...


What it took to set up that glorious, revelatory moment.

Then I watched a couple by the "anti-Ozu" Shohei Imamura's Vengeance Is Mine from '79, and '97's The Eel, both of which were films about men which I found fascinating for their depictions of women. But I didn't feel I could fully appreciate their significance in the whole history of Japanese cinema without filling in some enormous gaps in my own viewing history, so I sort of quit the project for the time being. It was all too much too soon.

After that I cast about, watching this and that film, without much focus, until my interest in the mustache was piqued. Make no mistake, the 'stache is back in a big way. Esquire made it official back in January, with its declaration that "the serious mustache is back" (italics mine). (Note, though, that even Esquire takes a poke at the so-called "serious stache" with their photo of a lopsided paste-on that accompanies the story.)

Truth is, whether Esquire had jumped on the bandwagon or not, the tide had already turned. Last year saw the Best Actor Oscar awarded to Daniel Day-Lewis for his turn as a mustachioed oil tycoon...


Then there was Philip Seymour Hoffman in his Oscar-nominated role as a retro muzzied Gust Avrakotos in Charlie Wilson's War...


And the Best Picture Oscar went to No Country For Old Men, whose protagonist, played without a trace of irony (strange as it may seem for the Coen Bros), was a "serious stache"-sporting Josh Brolin...

These three films represent the three most significant iterations of the mustache in current culture. Both Day-Leiws's and Hoffman's are meta-staches: they add not only context, as Brolin's "serious stache" does, but subtext as well. We are meant to notice them, meant to read them as low-brow commentary.

Brolin's mustache is the one that most interests me at the moment. It's handsome, proportionate, and complements his features. It's not a joke sitting on his face waiting to explode. If it serves a purpose here, it's decidedly not ironic: it's to establish his scrappy good nature and essential — but utterly masculine — innocence.

Brolin's character in No Country is pretty complex, in that, unlike the various indie movie cliches du jour, he is intensely ordinary, and his ordinariness is, again, not a joke. He's not sagacious and snarky. He thinks he's cleverer than he is, just like the rest of us. And he gets (spoiler alert) splattered in the end (the story of his inglorious demise is given short-shrift in the movie, but it was one of my favorite parts of the book).

Day-Lewis's Daniel Plainview is clearly out of touch, and his stache is unflattering and naff. The genius of Day-Lewis's performance is his willingness to go off the cliff at full-throttle, just as the character does. What critics may have failed to fully appreciate is how hard it is to carry off being this utterly ridiculous. Even the whiff of self-doubt, or the shadow of a wink, would have undermined the performance completely. The seriousness of it is the joke.

Philip Seymour Hoffman's stache in Charlie Wilson's War is pure period, but lends the character a slightly ludicrous air. Hoffman's Avrakotos is at the top of his game, and what we're supposed to find funny is his unabashed vanity. His accessories and accouterments add up to a personal style, and yet the end result is ridiculous. The too-short tie, the eyeware that was once high fashion now looks hopelessly outdated — the glasses are too much even for the retro crowd.

So, to recap.  It seems the stache is a sign of guilelessness, serious naffness, or sarcasm.  It's most interesting when it's least ironic, I think, since irony is so easily overdone these days. 

There is one more category I'll explore in my next stachecentric post: the existential mustache.  Of course any film festival dedicated to the mustache would have to open with Emmanuel Carrère's haunting La Moustache, an existential thriller about a man who shaves his off, and no one notices.  (When I told my office mate's the scenario, they were like, "remind us never to go to the movies with you.")

One last thing before we really get down to business here.  I'm not a big mustache fan.  But I'm not anti-mustache, either.  Like anything else, I think if you can pull it off, more power to ya.  James Brolin looks good in one.  Ryan Gosling's was darling in Lars and the Real Girl. Casey Affleck's was cute in Ocean's Twelve (it got a little out of hand in Ocean's Thirteen, though). 

But as a fashion phenomenon I'm currently fascinated with it.  I still haven't actually seen much evidence that young men are wearing mustaches any more than they were last year.  Hollywood's heretofore mainly ironic depiction of the mustache might have something to do with young men's reluctance to embrace it as a serious addition to their facial hair repertoire.  It has not caught on in professional sports, either.  If it does, watch out. 
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*As always, there are spoilers sprinkled about the post. Consider yourself warned.