‘Jim Queen’ Review: Hilarious French Queer Animation

“Jim Queen” is a film that very much sells itself (or very much does not, depending on the potential viewer) on its one-line elevator pitch. A cartoon about two gay men — one a vapid, brawny influencer, the other a shy, closeted slip of a thing — drawn together to fight Heterosis, a conversion virus launched by the conservative right on an unsuspecting queer community: You’re either in or you’re out, so to speak, and if you think that very premise sounds too silly to function, then nothing in French duo Marco Nguyen and Nicolas Athané’s dizzy, pastel-drenched satire is going to convince you otherwise. If the idea raises a chuckle, however, then so will much else in “Jim Queen”: a short, concentrated barrage of jokes good, bad and both, fired with enough energy and gee to keep a spirit of hilarity afloat throughout.

A rare shot of broad, brash comedy in the Cannes Film Festival — where it premiered in the Midnight section, providing something of a tonal counterpoint to the usual genre fare there — “Jim Queen” is in some ways a very French affair, shot through with specific satirical nods to local culture and politics (including a frosted-fascist villainess that some may liken to Marine Le Pen, though she’s more directly modelled on Sarkozy-era gay-rights opponent Christine Boutin). But it also translates readily to just about any market where there’s a vocal political movement against queer rights, which is to say more of the world than should be the case.

If the film’s somewhat non-intersectional evocation of the Paris queer community (with a heavy emphasis on the G over the LBTQ) leaves Nguyen and Athané’s film feeling slightly out of time in some aspects, that doesn’t affect the general giddy fun of the enterprise — and won’t stop “Jim Queen” from being a staple on the queer fest circuit in the coming year.

It opens on a high, with a musical number so fleet and funny and ebullient, you might wish the whole film had committed to the genre: In militaristic sync as they pound treadmills, down protein shakes and take steroid injections in the buttocks, a gymnasium full of lavishly buff (even 24-packed, to quote a droll visual gag) gay men blankly sing the praises of the body-beautiful lifestyle to a pounding EDM beat. Their alpha leader is Jim (voiced by Alex Ramirès), a ginger-bearded Adonis with pecs like rocks and a brain that’s considerably softer, not that his legions of Instagram followers and OnlyFans subscribers are after his thoughts.

Among those acolytes is Lucien (Jérémy Gillet), a reedy, repressed young virgin who yearns to be part of the gay community but hasn’t the courage to come out to his domineering mother Christine (Elisabeth Wiener), who also just happens to be the country’s very right-wing health minister. Off his bedroom, a literal closet lined with sex toys and Jim posters is visualized in a manner akin to Ariel’s grotto of dry-land keepsakes in “The Little Mermaid,” with a suitable accompanying ballad of yearning.

When Jim contracts the sexually transmitted Heterosis virus — a disease that causes an urge to move to the suburbs and procreate with the opposite sex, and withers the muscles to a dadbod consistency — and his social media numbers plummet, Lucien is left as his lone remaining admirer. As the gay masses instead flock to Jim’s burly scene rival Pavel, wittily voiced by porn icon François Sagat, Jim and Lucien team up to find out what’s causing Heterosis and what might cure it. It’s a quest that leads them along a neon obstacle course of nightclubs, cruising grounds and chemsex parties, pursued in turn by a rageful Christine, as well as the Gaystapo, a movement to “protect prostate pleasure” that resorts to violent reverse conversation therapy tactics to counter the virus.

As satire, it’s more loosely irreverent than devastatingly pointed, but alongside the satisfying potshots at the far right, Nguyen and Athané’s script also takes welcome aim at body fascism and other forms of discrimination within the gay community. Not that the film devotes too much time to moralizing when there are so many throwaway quips and sight gags to get through, toward a conclusion that advocates vigorous anal sex as a global cure-all.

The humor and storytelling can be likened to “South Park” in their senseless, fast-moving escalation toward absurdity, and the broadly cartoonish animation style — clean lines, popping eyes, flat expanses of color in ’80s mall-decor shades of pink, lilac and spearmint — is a running reminder of just how seriously to take the whole enterprise. At one point, Jim, Lucien and their cohorts infiltrate Christine’s heavily guarded estate under cover of a literal Trojan unicorn, exiting via its rectum: another very stupid and very funny visual joke that sums up “Jim Queen’s” altogether undisguised, uncompromised approach.