At the age of 48, it’s no longer possible to describe François Ozon as the enfant terrible of the French cinema, but it’s not merely the passing of time that is an issue. Ozon has built such a body of work – insightful on gender and sexuality, witty where most many directors would make do with warmth – that he has established his own pantheon, a sweeping range of not just features but also shorts and documentary works, that it’s difficult to consider him as an alternative or a rebuke to an established order. His recent works call back to earlier undertakings, but rarely has he repeated himself even while setting a cracking pace that’s established him internationally as well as in his homeland.
Ozon is a Parisian, raised on both the city and its films who studied at the University of Paris and FEMIS, the prestigious film school. He finished his first short at the age of 20 in 1988, and would make more than a dozen over the next decade. They established his name among cinephiles, although his debut feature, 1998’s Sitcom, was something of a misfire. But the next three full length movies, 1999’s Criminal Lovers, and 2000’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks and Under the Sand, established his style and viewpoint, before the delicious 2002 ensemble 8 Women, with its many leading ladies including Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert and Ludivine Sagnier, was both a tribute to and reworking of the cinema’s rich past.
Ozon’s inventiveness can be divined in the ways he manipulates chronology for insight, such as reversing the chronology in 2004’s 5 x 2 so that the story of a failed relationship begins with the divorce proceedings and ends with the blooming of love. The dynamics of small groups, whether family or friends, are often shaped by the absence of a key figure, while he’s been a committed chronicler of gay characters, reaching beyond simple screen cliches to give them complex, rounded lives. Ozon has both defined the realities of modern French urban life and spotlighted its flaws, all the while using a touch that is deftly playful and often telling.
For a double dose of François Ozon from SBS’s On Demand service, try the following pairing:
Under the Sand
(2000)
Whenever Charlotte Rampling is on the screen in this Ozon movie you feel as sound is superfluous. There’s an evocative subtlety in the way emotions play across her face: from the sharp glances in her eyes to the most casual pursing of her lips. Ozon’s film is brisk but telling, it never lingers but builds inexorably. Marie (Rampling) and Bruno (Jean Drillon) are a married couple on holiday and from the opening shot their happiness and ease together is palpable. When Bruno goes swimming and never returns, Marie deals with the grief by ignoring Bruno’s disappearance. She buys him presents and talks of him the present tense, unsettling both her friends and the audience.
Source: SBS Movies
There is no hysteria, she carries on working as a professor of English (she reads aloud from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves at a lecture, in an explicit act of symbolism) and slowly Bruno comes back to her, appearing in their Paris apartment and enquiring about her day. When she begins seeing Vincent (Jacques Nolot) Marie doesn’t seeing it as moving on, but having an affair behind her husband’s back. Some of the scenes, particularly Marie’s visit with Bruno’s vituperative mother, are painfully honest, but to the final, finely-held shot the outcome never reveals itself, preferring to uncover successive layers in Rampling’s excellent performance. The first line spoken is “Ready to go?” and the question resonates throughout, but there’s nothing close to a right answer in this sad, compelling work.
In the House
(2012)
In capturing the literary process in its youthful beginnings, Ozon stretches the mood so that it encompasses satirical comedy and obsessive thriller, all the while twisting the structure so that the director’s creation and those of his subjects are intertwined. If he’s renowned for his deployment of France’s great actresses, here Ozon find the perfect narrative foil in Fabrice Luchini, with his expressive face where consternation forever lurks, who plays Germain, a cheerfully pessimistic high school literature teacher, married without children to curator Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), who discovers in his perfunctory pile of student essays a detailed autobiographical work-in-progress by 16-year-old Claude (Ernst Umhauer), who befriends his sweet but dim classmate Rapha (Bastien Ughetto) so that he can explore his supposedly picture-perfect home and family.
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Claude is both a budding talent and a stalker, and Germain encourages him to keep writing – and thus continue infiltrating Rapha’s family – even as his own opinions start to influence subsequent drafts. Exactly who is the true author of the student’s work becomes unclear, and reality and fiction entertainingly merge in a way that Woody Allen was trying to achieve in various outings during the 1990s. Like Under the Sand, the idea of what is and isn’t real, and what we’re willing to accept, is at play here, but it’s unfolded with a witty brio that keeps Luchini’s face in comic contortions before a concise finale that sums up In the House.
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