Our summer comedy is a French animated film! A tender and deliciously biting satire of gay micro-tribes, Jim Queen, the queer sensation of the last Cannes Festival, turns the LGBT community into a pop playground. In theaters on June 17.
Catastrophe in Pedéland: a virus, the heterose, makes the gays lose their nerve. They suddenly desert the Marais, start understanding football, and ogle the chest of their best friend. The race for the antidote begins, bringing together Jim Parfait, a bodybuilding influencer just contaminated, and Lucien, a twink barely out from under his mother Christine’s skirts, a reactionary, fiercely homophobic minister, in the style of the Manif pour tous – any resemblance to a certain Boutin is probably not accidental.
This scenario is the pretext for a delirious quest at the heart of the community. “Be yourself, everyone else is already taken”, whispers Jim to his swarm of enamored followers. A gentle irony that this Oscar Wilde quote recycled under Instagram posts saturated with abs and filters, as the film playfully toys with the stereotypes to which gays are tempted to conform in order to find their place. Twinks, bears, drags, gym queens, puppies… It is in this communal gaze that is both teasing and affectionate that Jim Queen finds his energy, and a humor that is often deliberately crude and referential.
Poppers-fueled pop delirium
With razor-sharp lines and situations worthy of a cross between Drag Race and Fort Boyard, the film leans as much toward the recent series Big Mouth as toward the anime of the 1980s-1990s in the Sailor Moon style. The ultra-colorful artwork and the perfectly paced direction give this queer fable the look of a grand pop delirium powered by poppers.
And to bring life to this rainbow gallery of characters, Jim Queen gathers a cast as pretty as a unicorn: comedians Alex Ramirès and Shirley Souagnon, actor Jérémy Gillet (Arrête avec tes mensonges), porn star François Sagat, but also La Briochée (Drag Race France) and even Philippe Katerine who, after having been the blue-naked man at the opening ceremony of the Paris 2024 Olympic Games, continues here his career of appearances too hard to summarize to his friends with an even deeper role: that of a prostate.
Behind the jokes, the oiled muscles and the twink dramas, Jim Queen reminds us above all one thing: queers spend a lot of time caricaturing themselves among themselves, but they also know very well how to stand together when needed. Care bears? Maybe, but given the era, it may not be the most useless superpower.
