Finding the truth of who you are is something that comes to some people early in life, a lightning bolt of self-recognition that sets them off on an unalterable course for the rest of their days, and to others, much later on, a disrupting epiphany that upends the status quo while causing them to question everything they have ever known.
The protagonist of Three Nights a Week (Trois Nuits Par Semaine), directed and co-written by Florent Gouëlou, Baptiste (Pablo Pauly) is very much in the second camp, discovering on one fateful night that he is not as straight as he thought nor is his life sufficiently expansive enough to accommodate the full spectrum of who he is.
On the night that his life changes forever, the aspirant photographer has accompanied his often-absent girlfriend of eight years, Samia (Hafsia Herzi) to the street clinic she is running to provide assistance to drag queens on sexual health, part of a wider outreach program which includes sex workers and others on society’s margins.
While he’s there to photograph their work, you assume for publicity purposes, he finds himself starstruck by a meeting with two drag performers Jerrie aka Bobel (Harald Marlot) and Cookie Kunty aka Quentin (Romain Eck) who, in an instant blast apart any ideas he might have about the way the world works.
Here are two people who inhabit the world of drag, a place Baptiste has never encountered and which proves to be impossibly exotic and alive with possibility in a way his deteriorating relationship with Samia and his moribund photographic career have never been.
He falls for Cookie Kunty almost instantly, the mutual attraction all but irresistible and while he tells himself he is simply undertaking a photographic project documenting the hitherto-unknown-to-him world of drag, which necessitates him going out each night to see the object of new drag affection, the truth he is falling headlong in love, in defiance of everything he thought he knew about himself, a tectonic shift in his life which transforms all manner of things about his life.
Samia doesn’t pick up on the shift at first, with her final year of medical training consuming her attention to a degree that leaves little room for anything else, but when she does she realises with an amicable realisation that their relationship is now terminal and that the transformation of her boyfriend is proceeding apace, his heart lost to Cookie Kunty/Quentin, whom he relates to and out of drag, and his life now on a path that leaves no room for her.
Their split, when it comes towards the end of the film, is an amicable one, speaking of the affection that exists between two people who know their time together is done and they are on separate journeys.
But while Samia and Baptiste navigate to a reasonably peace resolution, things are not quite so straightforward for Baptiste and Quentin.
Finding in the world of drag a sense of belonging – his close friends such as Bobel, Kiara Bolt (Mathias Houngnikpo) and Iris (Holy Fatma) are his found family and their bond is richly supportive and necessary amidst shocking homo-and-transphobia – and identity that the wider world simply doesn’t offer him, Quentin cannot separate himself from Cookie Kunty, a boundaries-blurred duality that makes it hard for Baptiste to know where he belongs.
He works hard, on the mother of all unexpected learning curves, to understand the drag world and why it means so much to Quentin and it’s while is on this transformative journey that he acts as the outsider-then-insider who introduces to the richness of what it means to be part of the drag community.
Gouëlou is himself a drag performer who performs under the name Javil Habibi, and so the intimate picture we are given of the French drag scene in Three Nights a Week is one that feels richly true and emotionally evocative, borne from someone on the inside who knows how much it means to people like Quentin and Bobel, each of whom are photographed by Baptiste in ways that strips away not just the layers of their make-up and costumes but also their true selves which to one extent or hide hide behind the drag persona they adopt.
Baptiste is open in a heartwrenchingly vulnerable way to the totality of whom Cookie Kunty/Quentin is but Quentin finds himself unable to reciprocate fully and open himself up, captive of a persona that nourishes, protects and sustains, something his uncle and surrogate father Jean (Jean-Marie Gouëlou) readily acknowledge but which also, in some ways, entraps him too.
Much of Three Nights a Week is a sensitively and emotionally rich portrayal of how you can be part of something endlessly and supportively wonderful, and the world of drag is all and more for Quentin, Bobel and their friends, and yet lose yourself in it too, and the road to the final act largely concerns itself with how Quentin has to match Baptiste’s journey to his true self, and own the totality of who he is.
Both the parts of him, Quentin and Cookie Kunty are gloriously good and delightful but he is struggling to bring them together in a way that makes sense to him and which allows Baptiste to get as close as very much wants to be.
Three Nights a Week is a sensitively understanding exploration of how hurt and rejection has shaped Quetin but in the end it recognises that for him to be with Baptiste and vice versa, that must move beyond the protective layers, some physical (his drag persona) and some not (hiding behind that same persona, which is good and healthy in and of itself but which has also given the opportunity to unhealthily hide himself from the real world) and open himself up as vulnerably as Baptiste has done.
In the end, the film is a story of two people, bound to be together in one of those fundamentally true ways that defines explanation but which is as necessary as breathing, discovering who they both are in ways revelatory and comforting and finding a way to be together, even if it seems like they will never reach that point, a truthful reflection of life which does not always offer neat outcomes or happy-ever-after endings.
As a love letter to truth, freedom and authenticity, and indeed overpowering true love itself, Three Nights a Week, is an impossibly romantic superlative gem, rich with characters so pleasingly and fully realised that you feel like they are friends and family by the end of the film, a storyline that eschews melodrama in favour of the grittiness of lived experience, which comes with enough dramas of its own, a portrait of a remarkably alive and mutually supportive world, and a palpable sense of lives reinvented, proof that with an open heart and a willingness to learn, anything is possible.