Margaret Qualley in Ethan Coen Whodunit

In Chérie is not!The latest film by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke, the lesbian trilogy of the film B by Tricia Cooke, Margaret Qualley plays Honey O’Donahue, a hard but glamor investigator in Bakersfield, in California. Honey is generally in the field of infidelity, taking cases involving suspicious spouses and their philandering partners. But at the beginning of the film Prankish in Coen, which was presented at first in Cannes and will be released in theaters by focus features on August 22, the detective is found in a mystery with higher issues. The death of a local woman leads honey on a sliding path involving religious cults, megalomaniac pastors and unexpected romance.

For the most part, Chérie is not! lives in the same thematic universe as the first solo narrative company in Coen Car dollsthat the director also co-written with Cooke. In this film, Qualley played a lesbian Lothario, which, after a bad break with his police girlfriend (Beanie Feldstein), travels across the country with her best friend (an excellent Geraldine Viswanathan). But their interstate adventure is compromised when they realize that their rental car contains essential goods for a harmful program, and women pass most of the film Leaden Road trying to exceed a pair of henchmen. Secondary on the wacky Caper is a love story which, disappointing, lacks real issues.

Chérie is not! is a better film than Car dolls Thanks to a engaging plot, but she finally suffers from the same problems as her predecessor: the film looks like a series of gags with nowhere.

In previous interviews, Coen and Cooke described their joint narrative companies as an opportunity to make films for a “badly served market”. The pair wants to put queer characters at the center of the types of impetuous genre films they admire, which is a refreshing goal, notably taken by other filmmakers like Emma Seligman (Stockings), Annapurna Sriram (F * CKTOYS) and pink glass (Liminant love). But even the coarse humor needs a narrative anchor, a story that maintains viewers invested significantly. Chérie is not! Starts with a little of that, but ends up rampant at the spectator’s good will in a third frustrating act which inspires more exasperation than laughter.

What works in this film are the performance and certain elements of its construction of the world. Qualley is much better suited to the role of a click of sardonic detective and hard in the city in town in its heels than for uninhabited lesbians with a distracting southern accent. Aubrey Plaza is also well sunk like her emotionally distant love, MG Falcone, a cop from the local constituency; And Chris Evans easily slips into the role of Drew Devlin, a leafy religious leader.

There is also a gallery of solid support characters, including Josh Pafcheck and Gabby Beans, who bring real humor to their roles as an assistant of Drew and Spider Assistant of Honey, respectively. And the credit must go to Peggy Schnitzer, whose excellent costume design – from Honey well -tated pants with catchy blouses of Spider – strengthens and distinguishes the role of each character in the surrealist ecosystem of this small town.

We meet honey on the site of a horrible car accident, where she joins Marty Metakawitch (Charlie Day), a homicide detective for the police service, to investigate damage. The name of the victim is MIA and although the scene looks like an accident, honey is not convinced. Instead of trying to support the private investigator, Marty simply flirts with honey. A recurring song throughout the film, which quickly becomes stingy, is Marty’s refusal to accept that honey is lesbian. In the context of this investigation, Honey begins to sleep with MG (Plaza), another officer of the local enclosure, and tries to help his teenage niece (Talia Ryder) to leave an abusive relationship.

Apart from Honey’s personal life, the details of a cult world emerging. Drew, a reverend for a church of the prosperity gospel, realizes that surveys on the car accident could conduct the authorities to the depth of his program.

Here is where Chérie is not! becomes trembling, revealing the limits of a film powered only by buffoonery. There are suggestions from a secret drug ring led by a group of French mafia, whose interests are represented by a mysterious French (Lera Abova) which rolls around Bakersfield on its Vespa. While more and more corpses appear in Bakersfield, Honey begins to make their link with the strange church which attacks vulnerable emotionally, especially young women. You want to know more about the program and how the church of Drew, that the arrogant pastor manages badly, fits into all of this, but Coen and Cooke developed since it helps to establish the next gag.

An equally convincing thread that does not get enough air is the relationship between honey and MG. Lesbians are an emotionally distant pair that met their match in each other. There is a mixture of hot and soft sequences, but as with Jamie and Marian Car dollsA feeling of incompleteness harassments in romance, especially since it takes darker and more twisted turns.

Qualley and Plaza do their best to shade their characters, and Plaza, in particular, makes a lot of more thin role. The two obtain net lining and there are gestures of the plot that try to deepen our sense of each character. But ultimately, Chérie is not! is the kind of film that has so much fun with himself that he forgets to let the public enter the joke.