This (spoiler-heavy) post compares three movies, all by French film-maker Francois Ozon.

They're intelligent films, with cultural references that (for me, at least) emerged only after some digging. And they share a predilection for leading the viewer up the garden path, encasing stories within stories, and generally blurring the bounds between reality and fiction.

Ozon started his directing career as an adolescent in the 1980s, when he made short films that starred his family members. In one, his brother kills their parents, who apparently quipped: "This way, you won't need to kill us for real..."

Summing up his goal in movie-making, he says: "At the cinema I like to be entertained, but mostly I like to be jolted, to be thrown off balance about what I think is right or wrong. In my own films I try to show how complex or ambiguous situations can be. I don’t take a stand. I pose questions. The spectator is smart enough to look for the answers in him/[her]self."

Certainly, all these films follow this principle.



1.
Dans la maison (In the House)
2012

Based on a play by Juan Mayorga (The Boy in the Last Row), this is the story of a pedagogic relationship gone wrong. Germain is a bored 50-something teacher of French. Claude is a 16-year-old student, and -- in stark contrast to his classmates -- an enthusiastic and able writer. 

The only problem is that what Claude writes becomes increasingly creepy and voyeuristic. Instalment by instalment, he describes his successful infiltration of the house and family of his classmate, Rapha (by dint of giving him maths coaching).

Claude is the eternal looker-in. The urbane, sporty, easy-going Rapha; his supportive, maty dad, Rapha-senior; his mother, Esther, who exudes "the singular scent of a middle-class woman" -- Claude, lonely and isolated, is fascinated by the whole package.

As Germain becomes increasingly involved and invested in the story -- reading the instalments to his wife, Jeanne; coaching Claude; and even bending a few school rules to facilitate the tutoring situation (and thereby keep the stories coming) -- several things happen. Firstly, the lines between the real and the imagined become harder and harder to distinguish; and secondly, writer and tutor take on the roles of co-conspirators. Claude survives to see another day, and begin the infiltration of another establishment. Germain, on the other hand, is disaster-bound, both as a teacher and a husband. 

Philip French, whose informative analysis of some of those cultural references I was talking about is worth quoting at length, interprets the movie as an investigation of the creative process:

"The movie begins by showing the school -- an austere modernist building of glass and concrete called the Lycée Gustave Flaubert, an invocation of the writer dedicated to making the perfect fiction that has the force and form of life itself. It gradually becomes evident that the film can be read as something going on in the mind of a man wholly preoccupied by the problems of making a work of art, someone who has on his mind Graham Greene's cruel precept that 'There is a splinter of ice in the heart of a writer'. Very obliquely we learn that Germain's given name is Claude, and that he himself is the author of an unsuccessful novel and haunted by its failure.

"The movie's title, In the House, clearly refers not only to the home of Rapha and his family that Claude is exploring but also to the famous 'house of fiction' that Henry James wrote about in his 1908 preface to The Portrait of a Lady. 'The house of fiction has in short not one window but a million,' he wrote, and went on to say that 'every one of which has to be pierced, or is still pierceable on its vast front, by the need of the individual vision and by the pressure of the individual will.' ...

"The most striking image in In the House has the young Claude and a deranged Germain gazing across a garden at a balcony on which two middle-aged women are talking volubly, though their speech cannot be heard. Who are they? What is their relationship? What is their story? The observers immediately enter into a competition, imposing narratives upon the two women. Night falls, the camera draws back and we see the whole apartment block, three floors of it, a dozen windows, modelled precisely as on the set of Hitchcock's Rear Window. Each is an entrance into the house of fiction revealing a different story. The director and the audience are drawn together as voyeurs imposing our narratives on what we see on the screen as we do when organising the world around us."

All up, a very satisfying movie.





2.
Jeune et jolie (Young and Beautiful)
2013

Ozon's trademark love of misleading is at work again here from the very beginning. When we gaze through binoculars at Isabelle, the beautiful young girl on the beach, we think we're looking through the eyes of some pervy old man. Actually -- though not entirely reassuringly -- it's her younger brother, who (along with their parents and another family) is also spending the summer holidays at the seaside.

It is on this same beach, a little later when she turns 17, that Isabelle voluntarily but unpleasurably dispenses with her virginity. She picks for this task a guy her own age, whom she neither loves nor respects nor wants to have anything further to do with. It's a rite of passage. Now it's done.

But once back at school in Paris she starts working evenings as a call-girl. She takes on a different name (Lea), and a different appearance (soberly smart). But her sad, lonely face, and her aloof, inaccessible demeanour change not one jot. At no point during the film, therefore, does she really let us in on what is driving her.

Desire for attention? But her family loves her, albeit in the slightly inept way in which families love teenagers. Desire for money? But she's not short of the stuff, it seems, and what she earns she doesn't appear to spend on anything. Desire for differentiation from her peers? But she is extraordinarily beautiful, which already sets her head and shoulders above her classmates.

Desire for power, then?  Maybe. Because, despite the vulnerability inherent in this work, she does exercise some power over these men. They pay her, after all. And youth and beauty know they are enthralling.

Is it an act of rebellion -- the desire to somehow defy and subvert the prosperous, liberal, professional reality that is her domestic background?

Or is it more the desire to flirt with danger? I liked the way this movie doesn't look down on sex work, or over-dramatize it, or turn the young woman into a simple victim. She gets cheated, yes, and she has to follow her clients' sometimes odd orders. But she's not raped, or infected, or impregnated, or murdered. She even encounters one older client, Georges, who seems to reach out to her at a level beyond the physical (it's the police investigation of his sudden death while he's with her that exposes her sideline to her horrified mother). Even so, behind every smooth hotel door there's a new, not entirely controllable, situation that she has to face down. Maybe she craves the adrenaline. And when you're 17, after all, you do have a tendency to think you're bullet-proof. 

As a side-note, I think Ozon takes this positive spin on sex work a tad too far. When, towards the end, Isabelle meets Georges' widow, who tells her she wishes she'd had the courage to charge men for sex, you feel you don't quite believe her...

The fact that we never have Isabelle/Lea's motivations spelled out for us divides critics. But ultimately I appreciated that ambiguity.



Isabelle's "normal" family offers a strange counterpoint to her "abnormal" activity. There's mum, horrified at her daughter's exploits, but carrying on with the guy from the family of friends they meet up with socially. There's the original dad -- somewhere. There's the second husband, who gazes just that tiny bit too long when he accidentally sees his stepdaughter naked. And the brother... Well, maybe it's just normal adolescent curiosity, but he is a little too much the voyeur for comfort.

Put all that together, and it's as though Ozon is saying: No-one is the driven snow here, so let's be careful with our judgements.

At one point we are introduced to a very beautiful poem by Arthur Rimbaud (there's an English translation here). "No one's serious at seventeen," it begins, and the subsequent stanzas, very beautifully and evocatively, capture one of those teenage coups de foudre that are over almost as soon as they've begun, but form the stuff of nostalgia when their subjects age. Yet this is not at all Isabelle's experience. She's not in love, and she's deadly serious... 

Just a couple more cultural references, to close:

The movie's title matches that of a magazine for young women that started in 1987 (and ran till 2010): "It’s the only magazine for young women that sees personal appearance both as a value and a pleasure, enabling each reader to appreciate their own worth and to play their part in the world." Hmmm...

And the movie, we're told here, pays homage to Luis Bunuel's 1967 production, Belle de Jour, which starred Catherine Deneuve (and sounds considerably weirder than Jeune et jolie...).

Bottom line: tantalizing, but interesting.





3.
Frantz
2016

World War I has just finished. There's still much hatred and grief in both France and Germany, and the Wacht am Rhein brigade is already stirring. So when Frenchman Adrien Rivoire turns up at the graveside of German Frantz Hoffmeister (strictly speaking, it's a virtual graveside, a memorial only, as the actual body was never found), it's a bit of an event, and you worry for his safety.

Adrien's obvious sadness over Frantz, however, leads both Anna (Frantz's fiancee) and the Hoffmeister parents to believe the two have been friends in a previous happier time. Adrien, far from disabusing them of this idea, weaves a story of two young men in Paris, at a time when the world was full of music and art and dancing. Anna, who has been deep in mourning, starts to re-emerge, entranced by this new person who knew Frantz.

When the truth emerges, it's very different. Actually, Adrien was the one who killed Frantz... Nothing personal. Just the horrors of war. You kill, or you're killed. But having discovered a letter to Anna in the dead man's pocket, and found himself unable to overcome his feelings of guilt and remorse, he decides to come and confess in person.

Anna, though horrified, is still fascinated by this man. And unbeknownst to Adrien, she diverts the missive that would have revealed all to the Hoffmeisters (a decision that has the backing of the priest). So, when Adrien goes away, Frantz's parents continue in ignorance. 

When communication dries up, and letters are returned, Anna tries to forget the Frenchman. But eventually, needing some clarity, she goes to Paris in search of him. We have a bit of a worry that he might have committed suicide, but she eventually tracks him down, and -- what do you know? -- he's on the cusp of getting married. Furthermore, whatever he may or may not feel about his victim's fiancee, nothing about that marriage plan is going to change.

The film ends with Anna in the Louvre, gazing again at Manet's Le Suicide, which -- she tells the young man sharing her bench -- makes her want to live. You hope she's telling the truth, but you're not totally sure, because this painting enigmatically shifts meaning as the film progresses.

Frantz is mostly filmed in black and white. The occasional switches to colour suggest happier times. We're left to decide later whether these are dreams, memories, or figments of the imagination.



I found by the end that I'd lost sympathy with the beautiful Frantz. Was his confession anything other than shallow and selfish? Unloading his information may have relieved him, but could only cause pain to others. And concealing his prior romantic entanglement in France just seems dishonest. Anna effectively now has to grieve two young men.

Nevertheless, the role Adrien plays has the effect of making Dr Hoffmeister face up to his own culpability. When his neighbours go all patriotic on him, he reminds them that they were all glad to send their sons to war to fight for the fatherland. They therefore can't escape some share of the blame when many of these sons don't return. You hope these fathers will learn from their mistakes next time. But then you remember what happened a scant two decades later...

This angle of the movie is its strongest, I feel. I was unaware of its timing when I watched it, but Ozon wrote the screenplay shortly after the Charlie Hedbo attacks in Paris, and was apparently influenced by the prevailing atmosphere: "It wasn’t my goal," he says, "but I realized while making the film that it would be political. I didn’t know Brexit would happen, I didn’t know Trump would be elected, but we felt a strange mood in France." Everywhere he heard people singing the Marseillaise, and became newly aware of the violence and nationalism of the lyrics.

As Alonso Duralde points out, in an otherwise unenthusiastic review, "When Anna is in a Paris cafe, the presence of a group of military officers prompts the patrons there to begin singing La Marseillaise. Decades of World War II movies have conditioned moviegoers to get uncomfortable when Germans start singing about the Fatherland, and to cheer when the French national anthem is sung. But the way Ozon shoots the Paris scene, it radiates jingoistic xenophobia... It’s a shocking moment that puts a new spin on centuries of history: forget the famous moment in Casablanca where Rick’s customers bravely drown out Nazi soldiers... For a French filmmaker to turn this Gallic rallying cry into something sinister is a truly audacious act."

Ozon's film is a relative of the 1931 movie by Ernst Lubitsch entitled The Man I Killed. But it's a sibling, rather than a descendant, as both were inspired by a three-act play (L'Homme que j'ai tue) by Maurice Rostand (he's the son of Edmond Rostand of Cyrano fame -- tiens! -- the man gets everywhere...), and Ozon was actually unaware of Lubitsch's movie when he started working on his adaptation of Rostand.

It is characteristic of Ozon's style that before Adrien's role in Frantz's demise is revealed, we are led to believe there might have been some romantic backstory between the two, an unavowed part of that (imagined) idyllic time in pre-war Paris. Yet there is still something elusive about the French soldier's bond with Frantz: "Throughout the movie, it’s unclear whether Adrien is romantically attracted to Frantz’s widow, or to the memory of Frantz himself. 'I liked the idea that there is something a little bit necrophiliac about it,' Ozon said. 'He falls in love with Frantz, and lies about it, which becomes something like a fantasy for him.'" Well, maybe... Maurice Rostand, after all, was at the heart of the gay scene in pre- and post-WWI Paris.

Overall, beautiful and thought-provoking, but just ever so slightly unsatisfying.