Welcome to my review and power rankings of the third episode of Drag Race France Season 1 – “The French Ball”!
I can’t even begin to imagine how intimidating a ball challenge must be as a contestant on Drag Race. You have no control over which of the many looks in your suitcase will be worn back-to-back for your first pair of looks, and you have 12 hours or less to construct your third one! Plus, rumor has it that queens get less than one hour to make the change from each look to the next, which includes make-up alterations.
That’s a lot of stress, especially early in the season when queens are still getting used to the rhythm of TV production!
This French cast acquitted themselves well across three categories – Ma France et moi, French Clichés, and the Cannes Film Festival design challenge. It helped that the unusual material restrictions for this design challenge were actually quite loose – the queens were free to use fabric to construct their looks, as long as they had multiple beach elements incorporated.
The episode delivered looks, but it also made clear which character archetypes our queens are portraying. We have our clear front-runner, our bridesmaid-not-bride, our young queen with a growth arc, our reciprocal arcs of growing and shrinking confidence, and a queen who is unfairly maligned by the judges so she can later enjoy a comeback.
Does that mean this season is already becoming too formulaic? Or, was the casting so good that the queens are naturally snapping into familiar Drag Race tropes?
I think that’s the right question to be asking in the third week of a tight eight-episode run. With the season reaching the halfway point with Snatch Game next week, the queens who aren’t on the ascent either need to surprise us or prepare to sashay away.
Now that Drag Race France has settled into it’s regular release day, I’ve moved my recap up to Sunday so I don’t have to wait a full week after each episode to recap the next one! We’ll see how that schedule shakes out with Drag Race Canada in the mix starting next week, with Drag Race Philippines following soon thereafter.
If you want to watch Drag Race France you can sign up for WowPresentsPlus to watch the many worldwide Drag Race franchises for $4.99 a month or $50 a year. (Note that if you’re in the US you will need to use a VPN to “visit” another country to see the US Franchise.)
With my general impressions of the episode out of the way, let’s get to my Drag Race France Episode 3 Power Rankings for The French Ball! The middle layer of the rankings has had a shuffle from my week two power rankings – with last week’s bottom queens on very different trajectories!
Lecteurs, start your engines. Et, que la meilleure Drag Queen gagne!
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Ever since Drag Race set foot on foreign shores with Chilé’s The Switch Drag Race in 2015 and Drag Race Thailand in 2018, the international editions of the Drag Race franchise have exploded! We now have ten total country- or region-based versions of the show, with two more on the way.