‘Queens of Drama’ Director Alexis Langlois Brings New Pop to Queer Stories

variety.com:

Ben Croll Premiering out of Critics’ Week in Cannes, Alexis Langlois’ debut feature “Queens of Drama” is a musical blast of queer culture euphoria, telling a decades-spanning, impossible love story between a pair of pop idols who begin as fans and then become lovers, who climb the charts and permeate the culture as enemies, and who end up forgotten, as time moves forward and a new generation of teenage fans claim new idols for themselves.

The film’s familiar rise-and-fall rhythms struck a chord with filmmaker Alexis Langlois, who cites Vincente Minnelli and George Cukor as inspiration. “I wanted to offer a great, romantic story,” says Langlois. “Really, to give all these queer characters – and the queer actors who play them — a sense of grand romance by mixing the codes and memories of classic cinema with something much more modern.” “And I like idea of the wheel of fortune,” they continue. “As soon as one character reaches the top, you know they’ll be back at the bottom pretty quickly.

There’s something so melancholy and romantic about has-beens, and in fact the film really shows how has-beens can be quite sublime.” Few would mix up Langlois’ thoroughly modern evocation of stan-culture aesthetics with Cukor’s “A Star is Born,” and that was precisely the point. “I tried to build bridges between different forms of pop culture,” the filmmaker explains. “Not to reconcile them, because these forms aren’t at odds with one another, but at least to marry them, because these are the two aesthetic universes that built me.” Like many, Langlois discovered cinema through the TV set, launching from series like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” towards older cinematic gems, and used pop music towards similarly enriching ends.