You can call La Boum (The Party) a mediocre teenager-movie or just another big manifesto of heteronormativity – but this film accamponied my teenage years like no other. And…I even came across its lesbianity…
“La Boum” takes us back to the eighties, when people were still smoking cigarettes, watching tennis on TV and using pay phones. The fortunate ones owned their first walkman, vinyl was still the #1 format and LESBIANS DIDN’T HAVE ANY TATTOOS yet. (If you look at that decade’s mainstream movies you could come to think that there used to be no lesbians at all!)
The film’s main character Vic (played by the then cute – now beautiful Sophie Marceau) is portrayed as straight as straight could be. She is looking for the right boyfriend, taking ballet classes and walking the world completely innocent and oh so n-o-r-m-a-l. In her (and all of her friends’) world homosexuality is not only no option, it simply doesn’t exist.
But I came to believe in the “lesbo potential” of her best friend Pénélope.
Imagine Alice Pieszecki in High School and you get an idea of her personality. Pénélope (played by Sheila O’Connor) is a tomboy. She’s funny, sporty, independent and amusing. She never wears dresses, hates to miss a party and always speaks her mind. And she makes a very supportive, honest and entertaining friend to Vic (=female bonding = the classic lesbian subtext).
And she constantly works on her image of a boy-crazy girl. (A well-known behavior for soon-to-be lesbians!) When she first met Vic she abruptly asked her if she ever dated a boy only to tell her about some guy she had met on holiday. Throughout the movie she dates several boys but doesn’t seem to be emotionally attached to one of them. In one scene we see her making out with her friend Arnaud (btw – he pings my gaydar too!!!) in a movie theatre and she is not really offended when he leaves just to see what his friend’s Jean-Pierre joke is all about. (This happens to be the only scene in which we see her kissing somebody though we hear a lot about it from her.) Later she also offers to “borrow” her latest fling to Vic.
This whole dating thing seems just about doing what everybody else is only dreaming about to her. She takes pride in bragging about her boys instead of trying to find true love (as Vic does). I’m pretty sure that a few years later she will have found that love with another woman…
But wait – there actually is another queer character in La Boum! Don’t be surprised it’s Vics great grandmother, just go and see PARIS WAS A WOMAN. Poupette (played by the late Denise Grey) might not be a lesbian but this lady certainly knows about the queer world.
Being a professional harpist she has always lived an unconventional lifestyle. That lovely old lady likes to be a little sassy, is not shying away from talking about sex and claims to be sleeping naked. She has seen the 1920’s Paris and somehow still represents that era – a celebration of the arts, of hedonism and free love. I assume she also knows about darker sides of life; not only because her longtime lover Jean-Louis is married to somebody else. And she is this movie’s only character who ever (discreetly) mentions homosexuality: she describes the (obviously gay – though this word is not actually used) man who had once introduced her to the world of the 1920’s Paris to Vic as <HelloOld-FashionedSubtext!>“the son of Lorenzo Di Medici and Orson Welles” and “the man who liberated women from their corsets”</ HelloOld-FashionedSubtext!> – Vic shows total cluelessness by asking her, if he freed her from her corset too, while Poupette just smiles about that.
This films Paris (the opening sequence shows some beautiful images of the city) isn’t burning at all. “La Boum” may be timeless in its portray of a first (and very innocent) love. But in every character’s life (unless they are over 70) there’s hardly any queerness around (yet). So we have to stick with Poupette until Pénélope finally starts burning…
top lesbian prop: talbot-matra rancho (family car)
top queer character: Poupette
top camp-moment: Françoise demolishing the beauty culture shop of her rival Vanessa (who somehow is the perfect caricature of a drag queen)
Tags: 1980, die Fete, La Boum, Paris, Sheila O'Connor, Sophie Marceau
tattooflavouredgirl/subtext 
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