Ozone scrapping: French maestro provocateur reveals family secrets

Can a crime be justified by love? How do good and evil, sinfulness and righteousness coexist in one person? And is there any hope for happiness in someone who has once made major mistakes? All these questions put before the audience Francois Ozon in his new film "What Happened in the Fall". Family melodrama turns into a detective, but the director prefers something else to the spectacular denouement. On why this unusual picture, released in the Russian hire, deserves the attention of not only connoisseurs of festival cinema - in the material "Izvestia".

In the village to his grandmother

Michelle seems to be an exemplary grandmother: lives in a large village house, bakes pies, friends with neighbor Marie-Claude and looks forward to the arrival on vacation favorite grandson from the capital. And now the joyful day has come. Michelle's daughter, Valerie, brings the child and is about to leave him to his mother, but the joint dinner ends quite differently than expected. Soon after the ill-fated meal Marie-Claude's son Vincent comes out of prison. And he very much wants to help Michelle in solving her problems with her loved ones, especially since she gave him money to create a small business.

The plot of "What Happened in the Fall" is not easy to retell, because at every step here is an unexpected twist, which is not worth revealing. The only spoiler that we will allow ourselves: both retired neighbors have "skeletons in the closet". And here it is appropriate to recall one of the most famous early films Ozon - a tape that made him, perhaps, the main French director of the 2000s and, importantly, a favorite of the general public: "Eight Women" (2002).

Recall: the essence of this musical, masquerading as a retro-detective, just that the heroines outwardly prosperous family, faced with a mysterious murder, began to reveal themselves from unexpected sides. The youngest of the women, a teenage girl, who, as it turned out, and made the whole mess, played Ludivine Sanye. A favorite of Ozon, she also starred in his "Raindrops on Hot Rocks" (2000) - the second full-meter director, where the main components are sex, murder and immorality of all the characters, and then - in "Swimming Pool" (2003), another provocative quasi-detective, which became a festival hit.

Attack of the clone: Pitt Hospital series departs from the canons of medical drama

The project, which has been unofficially dubbed an "ER" remake, has received critical acclaim

Then Sanye had many worthy roles in the works of other directors - in particular, the general public remembered her for her participation in the series "Young Dad" and "The New Dad" Paolo Sorrentino. But the return to Ozon is symbolic in its own way: again these two, as 20-odd years ago, explore the darker sides of human souls. However, to replace the defiant frankness (in "Swimming Pool" and "Raindrops ..." Sanye defile completely nude, and erotic scenes provided tape rating 18 +) and deliberate style tricks came outwardly very restrained, calm, even chaste narration. And only gradually we realize that in front of us is not an ordinary family drama.

Forgive and understand

Here we can draw another parallel - with the recent Cannes triumphant, "Anatomy of a Fall" by Justine Trieu, where a successful writer in court battles proved that she was innocent of her husband's death, but the more details of the spouses' private life became public, the less we wanted to sympathize with the protagonist, even if she did not commit murder as such. The latter, however, at Trieu and remained in doubt - and now a similar technique is used by Ozon. But goes further.

In "What Happened in the Fall" not only the key event, but also related circumstances, down to the smallest, shown in such a way that until the end is not clear what really happened. The viewer clings to the facts (or what the characters pass off as fact), tries to analyze them, but ends up in a dead end. In the end, however, he realizes that, in fact, none of this really matters.

Every character is morally flawed, including the youngest. Ozon is far from the idea that children are innocent creatures. And if in "Eight Women" character Ludivine Sanye was driven by love for his father and a sincere desire to show him the whole underbelly of the women around him, then in a fresh tape grandson Michel is ready to forgive his grandmother not only for her dubious past, but also for new, much more serious offenses.

"It's an odyssey - emotional and sexual. The movie makes you feel."

Nicole Kidman and Harris Dickinson - about their characters in the erotic thriller "Bad Girl," age difference and strange relationships

But do we have the right to pass a verdict and condemn him, his mother, his grandmother, Vincent? The peculiarity of "What Happened in the Fall" is precisely that Ozon persistently avoids evaluating himself and puts the viewer in a position where any of our assessment is vulnerable. In addition, the characters are all sympathetic in their own way. The least of all, by the way, we penetrate just to Valerie, although it was she who suffered the most. She sympathizes, but no more than that.

In this work, Ozon shows himself a master of psychological cinema. But his drama is not one where everything is laid out in the end. This is quicksand, in which it is impossible to find solid ground, at least something to lean on, but it really drags on. For all the "cinematography", maybe even intentional artificiality of some plot collisions "What Happened in the Fall" is very vital in the main. As in reality, no one dots the i's and dot the i's at the end of the story. And we can only wonder whether the remaining characters will be able to get out of the vicious circle of vicious decisions and compromises with conscience - or will pass them on to the next generation. And those will uncomplainingly take up the baton on the same beautiful, clear, autumn day.