Francois Ozon: wannabe auteur makes good

Film Comment, July-August, 2001 by Frederic Bonnaud

Francois Ozon is a special case in contemporary French cinema. Initially noted for four strikingly original shorts he made after graduating from the French national film school (La Femis), he provoked a minor critical controversy with his first -- and only -- medium-length film, See the Sea (Regarde la mer, 97). His champions saw evidence of great audacity and talent; his detractors, of which I was one, found nothing but easy provocation and a certain symbolic heaviness. Even though the film wasn't widely seen, due to its awkward 52-minute running time, it sparked a lot of discussion. Ozon's follow-up, the feature-length Sitcom (98), cost him some of his most ardent fans, but audiences made this adolescent game of death into a modest hit. As a result, he secured a much more comfortable budget to shoot Criminal Lovers (Les Amants criminels, 99), starring Natacha Regnier, who, fresh from the international success of The Dreamlife of Angels, received a large fee for her triumphant return to the screen. The reception of Ozon's second feature was disastrous -- unanimously torn apart by the press, the film was also a commercial flop, despite a marketing blitz. At this point, I was still in the anti-Ozon camp. But at the 2000 Berlin Film Festival, I liked his next effort, Water Drops on Burning Rocks (Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brulantes), which was adapted from an early Fassbinder play. The film was favorably received in Paris and did well at the box office. But it was only with his latest, Under the Sand (Sous le sable), that I finally switched sides. The film won praise from all quarters and put Charlotte Rampling back in the spotlight (she appeared on every magazine cover from Elle to Cahiers du Cinema to Les inrocktuptibles). To general amazement, Under the Sand clocked an unheard-of 600,000 admissions (or roughly $4 million gross) in France, a huge number for such an uncompromising film d'auteur. With four films in three years, Ozon has risen from the status of an "over-eager young showoff" to that of a "definite asset to French cinema, a bankable auteur." Such a trajectory is rare in France, where the critical tradition, in thrall to auteurism, is all too frequently to embrace or dismiss filmmakers for good on the basis of one film. When I met Ozon at the Vienna Film Festival last November, where he was presenting Water Drops, he was impatiently awaiting Under the Sand's release, which would allow him to throw himself into a new project and satisfy his insatiable need to make movies. But he didn't have the money, and had become resigned to the idea of shooting on DV. I consoled him by suggesting that it was far too soon after an extravagantly flattering Ozu/Ozon comparison (made by Vincent Ostria in Les Inrocks following Under the Sand's screening at the San Sebastian Film Festival) to be complaining again. We both laughed at the unbearable lightness of French criticism, its capriciousness and single-mindedness.

To reconsider the films of a director you've once detested and whom you then began to like is a strange critical exercise. Was my initial rejection of Ozon completely off the mark, or had he improved over time? A little of both. On re-viewing See the Sea, almost four years later, I finally understood what had prevented me from grasping Ozon's obvious talent: a single shot. If you can come to like a film because of a single sequence, a line of dialogue, or two good minutes smack in the middle of an ocean of mediocrity, you can just as easily reject a film because of one shot, a shot that represents a terrible lapse in taste. This damned shot in See the Sea shows a young woman brushing her teeth. So? What's the problem? It's that her toothbrush has been dipped in a toilet bowl full of excrement a few shots previously by the creepy drifter whom she has taken in. Ozon's insistence on a logical progression in presenting this repugnant desecration of hygiene is heavy-handed, underlining something that would have been much stronger and smarter had it been passed over in silence. It's not the cruelty toward the victim that bothers me, but the tiresome feeling of being treated like an idiot to whom everything must be explained and demonstrated. This shot unforgivably diminishes the sense of mystery that the film has painstakingly constructed. But just as unforgivably, the simple presence of this shot prevented me from seeing the film for what it was. For a long time, this youthful lapse on the part of the director came between me and one of his most passionate films.

In fact, See the Sea is very close to Under the Sand -- it's a rough draft of the later film. The two films share many common elements: a woman's solitude, her explicit sexual desire (female masturbation is a recurring motif in Ozon's universe), her intimate rapport with a nature that is at once trembling and opaque. But See the Sea is a youthful effort, a cruel tale grounded in the notion of phobia, whereas what's striking about Under the Sand is its surface calm, its hidden violence, its mastery and maturity. The earlier film doesn't adequately conceal its psychological hypothesis: because she has had an abortion she has not yet come to terms with, a drifter kills a mother and kidnaps her young daughter, leaving behind her tent as a tomb of fabric for the horribly mutilated corpse. As with the toothbrush, this explicit sequence of events is too crude, and prevents the film from insinuating itself into the viewer's imagination. It's as if Ozon needed to reassure himself by making this appalling story more readable than it needed to be. Despite this, the film's use of silence and contemplation is very accomplished, rendering palpable the fusion of mother and child, but also the more horrific side of the story: Ozon uses small details to gradually introduce a sense of unease and dread, of things slowly skidding out of control. The normality of the mother abandoned by her husband, who, little by little, admits to her fundamental sexual dissatisfaction, is met with the heavy, dirty physicality and natural bluntness of a deviant. This grotesque does nothing but deny her femininity until she finally takes the life of a woman who personifies blooming femininity, in order to seize her child. Slightly schematic, yet infused with powerful strangeness, See the Sea might be compared to Austrian filmmaker Michael Haneke's best films (that is, before he made that interminable sermon with Juliette Binoche, Code Inconnu).