VENICE 2026 Giornate degli Autori
Review: A Man's Skin
- VENICE 2026: With her second feature, Léa Domenach ushers audiences into a queer, feminist fairy tale set in the 15th century yet perfectly attuned to the present
Venice's 23rd Giornate degli Autori comes to a musical close with a leap back to the 1400s and a mysterious skin capable of throwing the order of things into disarray - at least temporarily. Adapted from the graphic novel of the same name by Hubert and Zanzim, A Man's Skin is Léa Domenach’s second feature: a fantastical, queer, feminist musical comedy that opts for levity to tackle a topic that is anything but light - namely, the construction of gender identity and the power dynamics between men and women. It's an apparently timeless subject which, precisely through the imagined Middle Ages we see here, ends up speaking to the present with a startling urgency.
It opens by singing the joys of marriage, in a collective ritual that seems to promise the young Blanche (singer-songwriter Claire Pommet, better known as Pomme) a fairy tale-like future. But the promise is short-lived: her father, the king (Laurent Stocker), has decided to marry her off to Melchior (Louis Peres), a boorish army commander she barely knows and does not want. A way out is offered to her by her grandmother, played with gusto by Catherine Deneuve, who reveals the existence of a mysterious skin capable of turning a woman into a man. Blanche dons it and becomes Léonard (Stefan Crépon), thus gaining the chance, while in disguise, to get close to the very man who is meant to become her husband and to get to know him better (the cast also features Karin Viard as the exuberant queen).
Domenach deploys a device long familiar to cinema and literature – body-swapping – to observe what happens when a woman literally crosses the boundary of gender. In Léonard’s shoes, Blanche slips into places forbidden to women, drinks in cabarets, speaks more freely and discovers how male privilege is embedded in the most everyday gestures. In this world, where women are even denied the right to drink without being deemed vulgar, “woman” is the ultimate insult.
The film’s most effective strategy is to approach this awakening through comedy, song and disguise, with the music lightening the material without shrugging off its weight. The movie seems to ask not only what it means to be a woman or a man, but above all what happens when others change their behaviour towards us because they perceive us as belonging to one gender or the other.
Blanche’s experience also takes an unexpected romantic turn. In the guise of Léonard, she truly gets to know Melchior, and an intimacy blossoms between them that could never have existed within a traditional marriage. And it is precisely through this game that the film gradually lets its more political dimension emerge. While Blanche experiments with the freedom afforded by her second identity, the kingdom is riven by a witch-hunt against “inverts”, and a persistent drought heightens collective fear. Religion presents itself as the answer to the crisis, but also as a tool of control: it decrees who is wrong, who must be punished, who may love and who may not.
The Middle Ages, then, are not merely the colourful setting for a fairy tale; they are a mirror that allows Domenach to observe the present from a certain distance, heightening its contradictions. The director takes to their logical extreme the principles of a society that claims to protect its values by deciding over people’s bodies and desires. Thus, in a contemporary cinema often inclined to explore identity through trauma, A Man's Skin instead embraces the pleasure of metamorphosis, of music and play. A skin to be changed, then, not in order to become someone else, but to discover just how constricting the one we had been assigned really was.
A Man's Skin was produced by Karé Productions and Trésor Films in co-production with France 3 Cinéma and Umedia. Its international sales are handled by Playtime.
(Translated from Italian)
Photogallery 11/09/2026: Venice 2026 - A Man's Skin
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© 2026 Isabeau de Gennaro for Cineuropa @iisadege
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