The Italian edition of Chloé Cruchaudet’s acclaimed graphic novel Mauvais genre, published under the title Poco raccomandabile, tells a story as haunting as it is fascinating. Set against the backdrop of the First World War and its chaotic aftermath, it follows the extraordinary journey of Paul Grappe, a young French soldier who deserts the front and survives by living as a woman named Suzanne. What begins as an act of survival gradually transforms into a deeply personal exploration of identity, desire, and the fragile boundaries between love and betrayal. Inspired by true events, Poco raccomandabile is not simply a historical narrative but an emotional study of human transformation, where war, gender, and love collide in unpredictable ways.
At the heart of the story lies the marriage of Paul and Louise, a working-class couple in Paris whose lives are torn apart by the Great War. When Paul deserts after the unimaginable trauma of the trenches, he faces the death penalty if discovered. Louise, fiercely loyal and inventive, helps him disguise himself as a woman so he can move freely in public without attracting suspicion. Together they invent a new identity: Suzanne Landgard. What begins as a practical ruse slowly evolves into a new life, a new self, and a dangerous freedom. In Suzanne’s skin, Paul discovers sensations he never knew he possessed. He finds work at a factory, where he is surrounded by women, and experiences a different rhythm of life, one that at first feels liberating and even playful. The irony is sharp: by escaping the rigid codes of masculinity enforced by the army and the war, Paul finds himself immersed in the constraints and performative nature of femininity. Yet, paradoxically, that masquerade opens him to an uncharted inner world.
Cruchaudet’s depiction of Paul’s transformation is at once tender and unsettling. The reader sees Suzanne emerging not merely as a disguise but as a complex extension of Paul’s psyche. Louise, who once seemed the stable partner, becomes both accomplice and victim of this metamorphosis. At first, she laughs at Paul’s clumsy efforts to mimic female gestures and helps him find his feminine voice. Gradually, however, the lines blur between affection and estrangement. The man she loved is slipping away, replaced by someone she cannot entirely recognize. Suzanne enjoys being desired, both by men and women, and explores the sensual underworld of the Bois de Boulogne, a space where gender fluidity and erotic freedom flourish in the shadows. What started as a desperate measure becomes a headlong dive into forbidden pleasures.
What makes Poco raccomandabile extraordinary is Cruchaudet’s ability to weave the historical and the intimate into a single fabric. The war looms over the story as a silent third character, an invisible force that shapes every decision. Through Paul’s trauma and Louise’s complicity, Cruchaudet questions what happens to human identity when violence destroys the old moral order. Her art amplifies this ambiguity. The drawings, dominated by grey tones, evoke both the grime of war and the suffocating atmosphere of postwar Paris. Against this muted palette, flashes of red appear, on lips, fabrics, or blushes, becoming a visual symbol of femininity, desire, and ultimately blood. The red that once signified life and seduction returns at the end as the color of death.
The Italian title Poco raccomandabile captures perfectly the novel’s tone: these are characters who live on society’s margins, condemned for their moral and gender transgressions. Yet Cruchaudet invites us to see them not as outcasts but as mirrors of an age torn between modernity and decay. The 1920s, often romanticized as a decade of liberation, appear here as a time when the boundaries of gender and respectability are still fragile, easily broken by trauma and poverty. Through the lens of this couple’s tragedy, Cruchaudet suggests that war itself destabilized not only nations but the very idea of what it means to be a man or a woman.
Poco raccomandabile is based on the historical account La Garçonne et l’Assassin by historians Danièle Voldman and Fabrice Virgili, but Cruchaudet’s adaptation is more than a retelling. It is a reinterpretation, where history becomes a stage for exploring psychological and societal paradoxes. By humanizing her protagonists, she rescues them from the pages of a scandalous police report and turns them into tragic archetypes of postwar disillusionment. The result is a work that resonates with contemporary readers who still grapple with questions of gender, freedom, and authenticity.
In Italy, the story gains an additional layer of meaning. The translation of Mauvais genre into Poco raccomandabile places the narrative within a linguistic context that emphasizes moral suspicion. In Italian, being “not very recommendable” implies social danger, something improper or shameful. Yet that is precisely what makes Cruchaudet’s story so moving. Paul and Louise are not heroes or villains; they are flawed, vulnerable beings caught in the undertow of history. Their choices, however desperate or misguided, reveal the human desire to survive, to love, and to redefine oneself in a world that allows no easy answers.
Ultimately, Poco raccomandabile stands as a rare and poignant meditation on the instability of identity and the price of freedom. It transforms a forgotten episode of wartime France into a universal tale about the masks we wear and the truths we hide from ourselves. In the silence between its frames, amid the shadows of war and the shimmer of silk dresses, Chloé Cruchaudet finds the essence of tragedy: that the search for liberation can sometimes become another form of captivity.
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