I know, I know, this is a day late, but real life and real responsibilities have been taking over my life. I’ve just had difficulty finding time to do anything outside of work.
But I’ve got free time and now I can catch up with Drag Race France!
In the previous episode, we saw Lula Strega snatching a win and Edeha Noire bidding the queens adieu. And this was after a truly gag-worthy Maxi Challenge that saw them go back to the Werk Room after they walked the runway.
After the requisite mourning in front of the departed queen’s mirror message, Ruby On The Nail and Lula Strega both share their thoughts about the competition in their respective talking heads. Ruby, of course, wants to stop being in the bottom, while Lula wants another win now that she’s tasted one. Will they by the main characters in this episode? We shall see!
The next day, Leona Winter is being shady, although I have to put that in italics since she did call Gia Gunn a “Chinese clown” when Gia is Japanese. Is Leona Winter just being shady or is she just a flat-out bitch? We shall see!
As they wait for Nicky Mail, the queens start talking about the “frame curse”, noting that both Norma and Perseo ended up in the bottom after the episodes where they got their pictures framed. Lula’s confident that it’s not going to happen to her since she’s already been in the bottom, but since production has highlighted this conversation, there’s a good chance she’s landing in the bottom again. We shall see!
Nicky finally arrives and after giving out hints that made it apparent to the French queens that the challenge is going to be about Celine Dion, calls the Pit Crew in to bring in a massage table so the queens…can give her a massage? I will be honest, the mini challenge sections of Drag Race France aren’t exactly my favorites. I never understand them and they usually don’t have any bearing on the Maxi Challenge anyway.
AND IT TURNS OUT THAT WASN’T EVEN THE MINI CHALLENGE. JUST JOKES. The mini challenge for this episode is a parody of Les Zazamours, a game show I know nothing about, and neither do the non-French queens competing.But basically they’re parodying something like The Newlywed Game, I guess?
And Les Zazamours happens and…I don’t get the references well enough to find it funny. I did find Le Filip even in quick drag still very Bel Ami model-ish. I’d watch that video after downloading it from a torrent site! Which would probably impact this episodes Maxi Challenge as much as this mini challenge did.
This week’s Maxi Challenge is a Celine Dion Rusical and the queens get to pick their own parts. Norma Bell picks the role of Celine Dion’s husband so that she can step out of her comfort zone and while the courage is appreciated I hope she doesn’t step too far away from her comfort zone because production is probably crafting her bottom two storyline as she speaks.
Lula Strega also volunteers to take on the shortest part in the Rusical to challenge herself and make herself stand out and if that isn’t the perfect recipe for a bottom placement I don’t know what is. Drag Race is very fickle when it comes to rewarding out of the box!
We get the first conflict of the night as Ruby On The Nail and Leona Winter both want the Vegas Celine part and neither one of them wants to back down. And it’s probably the recent stuff that has come out about her but I am not particularly inclined to take Leona’s side in this argument. But alas, it is Ruby On The Nail who ends up blinking and ends up with a part that she considers boring.
With the queens having picked their parts, Nicky comes in with a little help — Celine Dion impersonator Fabien whose Celine impersonation is unclockable if I do say so myself. Now here’s one thing from Drag Race France that I really find outstanding. They also introduce other aspects of France’s queer scene, like the drag kings in a previous season that I can’t recall at the moment and now with celebrity impersonators who have been in the business for more than a decade.
Surprisingly, we don’t get any rehearsal footage for this season’s Rusical but we do get a touching story from Lula Strega about her childhood being bullied for being queer and effeminate. The bullying got so bad that she even considered suicide and then the rest of the queens share their own stories of childhood bullying.
it really does blow my mind that all of this still happens in “progressive” countries. You all brought homophobia over here and look down on the “Global South” for hanging onto those backwards ideologies but you can’t even stamp it out of your own countries!
Now, am not really a Celine Dion fan, but I gotta say Ruby On The Nail really got those hand movements down pat I actually laughed out loud. The other queens I think also performed well but I don’t know enough about Celine or the French language to know if thee performances were actually good or if the lyrics were great. Here, have a video from Celine Dion’s Eurovision stint as a distraction!
I also think that the Rusical was a little too earnest and didn’t do much in the way of parody? But then again they did earnest with Hunchback of Notre Drag and they cried over it so maybe I am just missing some French cultural things. I did love the Piche cameo with the stunning Titanic outfit.
With a whole Rusical dedicated to Celine, of course the runway theme would be Night of a Thousand Celines. Like I said, I’m not exactly a follower of Celine’s career so I do wish that there were pictures of the outfits that the queens were referencing so I could follow along.
During the judges’ critiques, no one really got totally positive other than Le Filip, with the rest of the queens getting positive and negative feedback. Maybe they’ll all lip sync!
And now we see what the episode has been building up to — a non-elimination with Le Filip and Leona Winter lip syncing for the win. It was immediately apparent the moment Le Filip wasn’t called as the winner by the time they got to the third safe queen. Honestly I feel like production just didn’t want the win to Le Filip so they had her go up against Leona.
Ron Does Stuff 
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