Le temps qui reste

How someone can NOT like this film is beyond me. The emotions the lead character goes through feel completely genuine. This is one of the best movies about dying that I've seen. The lead actor is awesome, and the emotions and physical transformation he goes through are very realistic. This movie was out for about 2 weeks here in California and then it disappeared. Maybe it's too depressing. I don't know. It will make you think though, and occasionally, it will make you laugh, because when you know you have nothing to lose, you speak your mind, as the lead character does.

A great film.

The first thing that strikes me as very unusual about this movie is that the main character is gay, and that that is not the subject of the movie, not even an issue. I don't know of any other movie like that.

Having said this, let's leave the subject of homosexuality, just like the film does, and not scare heterosexuals away. Of course the subject of the movie, saying goodbye to life, isn't new, neither original. But sometimes it isn't the story itself, but the way it is told that makes it worthwhile. To my opinion Ozon is a very good storyteller. I think tenderness, and the love for people and for life itself must have inspired him a lot.

Some scene's could be seen as provocative and politically incorrect, but the way they are woven into the story makes them credible and the way they are filmed makes them just beautiful. Ozon has a way of filming sex scene's as what they are; a nice part of everyday life.

The movie left me moved, but not sad.

Funny enough, I didn't expect this film to be such a great moment of cinema. I had read a couple of reviews, and most of them were rather lukewarm. I experienced this film like a soft punch in the face and the stomach, and I felt a kind of empathy with most of the characters (except maybe with the sister), because they all represent a problem in modern life. And the actors were so good at their job, without forcing it, that I didn't even think 'Oh wait, but it's Jeanne Moreau playing the part of...", etc. And there's even some humor: sometimes I laughed, and not because I felt ill at ease, but just because it was plainly funny. But it's not a comedy. It's a reflection about love, life and death. How those three can be simple, beautiful, and painful. A beautiful parable on life without any screaming, violence, shooting (like in 'Crash', for instance, which was also a beautiful film in its own way). Go and see it! It might change the way you look at life. If only for an hour or two...

Time to Leave (2005)

Besides being interminably sad, even when it has shreds of love and hope and genuine friendship built in, Time to Leave is also a tonic and a balm. It makes the worst of situations reasonable. Not good, not desirable, but imaginable, which is something, too. It's an absorbing movie at its best, but is often slow and a hair predictable, within the range of themes in films of our era.

As a movie, beyond the subject (which is what it is), there is a feeling of the ordinary even as the characters are often a bit beyond even extraordinary. The welcome spectre of Jeanne Moreau as his grandmother is great, and yet their relationship is tender to the point of incestuous. Maybe. And his love for his father, very touching, also trembles a little on the edge of beautiful liberalism. What I mean is, for all its touching, realistic touches, there are many moments that cut across the veneer that we are to believe. And it loses it's candid believability, leaning into an idealized sheen, without ever leaving it totally, into a fairy tale of some kind.

So I didn't quite settle into the whole experience very well, and watched with impatience by halfway through. Maybe his lack of denouement is ours, as well, but that reminds me of art school when people with bad art would say something along the lines of, "I wanted it that way." Director Francois Ozon may have wanted this steady trauma and despair laced with love and deflated by the banal, but he could have also wanted something that left us viewers more fully moved, entranced, enlightened, or even, alas, puzzled. I was touched, in the end, by my own feelings and fear of dying, and of being surprised by its coming too soon, and the movie did less to illuminate that as to simple serve as a reminder about it, leaving the work, and the awfulness, up to me.

"time slips away and the light constantly fades..." (the Cure, Seventeen Seconds from the eponymous album, 1980).

Here comes François Ozon once again with a long-anticipated vehicle and a prickly topic which has been used countless of times in cinema with varying results: a person who has an incurable disease and who's going to die soon. She's got only a few months, even weeks to live. How does she react? How does she live her last moments of life? This is the thrust of Ozon's latest opus "Le Temps Qui Reste" (2005) and it is a remarkable movie in which Ozon eschews what could have caused the fiasco of the film: pathos. There's no whiff of it in Romain's slow way towards death. According to his author, it is the second opus of a trilogy begun with "Sous Le Sable" (2000) and which will close with a third film about the death of a child. It's true that "Le Temps Qui Reste" has a few common points with "Sous Le Sable": both end with a sequence in which the main protagonist is standing on a beach but the difference between the two films lies in the fact that in "Sous Le Sable", the viewer and Charlotte Rampling weren't fully sure about Bruno Cremer's death. Maybe did he abscond, maybe did he leave Rampling whereas here we are absolutely sure about the terrible truth: Romain is going to die in spite of the words pronounced by the doctor aiming at bringing an inkling of hope. Besides, the sequence at the hospital is credible. A doctor has to tell his patient that there is a glimmer of hope although he pertinently knows the tragic exit. The sequence which comes after where we can see Romain sitting on a bench, looking around him also rings true.

So, Romain is a young photograph in his early thirties. He's homosexual and lives with his lover in a quite comfortable flat. His life shows all the signs of professional and sentimental success. But one day, everything falls apart when one day he learns that he has a generalized cancer. Where Ozon retains the attention is how he shoots the evolution of his main character. The author of the fabulous "8 Femmes" (2002) has once said that he didn't care about the New Wave (although he puts Eric Rohmer and Claude Chabrol in his straitjacket of favorite filmmakers). Well, I don't care for it either apart from notable exceptions. Among these exceptions, there's "Cléo De 5 à 7" (1961) by Agnès Varda, probably one of the most accessible movies of this movement in spite of the gravity of the topic. The topic is the same as "Le Temps Qui Reste" and the psychological evolution of Cléo is more or less the same as Romain's. Ingoing at the beginning of their tragedy, mature at the end as death comes closer. In Romain's case, Ozon presents him as an obnoxious, brazen and egocentric young man who only lives for his job. Then he has an argument with his family an evening (the sequence of the dinner is quite incommoding) and then with his lover. He decides to visit his grandmother (Jeanne Moreau) and his stay at her house constitutes the crux of the film. He finds himself with a person who lives the same situation as him. He tells to her: "because me and you we are close to death". In Varda's piece of work, it was a young soldier Antoine who helped Cléo to accept her disease and so made her fearless facing death because he saw death very close to him too (the context was in 1961 during the Algerian war, a "dirty war", the equivalent of Vietnam for the USA). In Ozon's flick, Romain's stay at her grandmother's altered him: he tries to reconcile himself with his family, his lover and is even ready to make a baby to a family (the young woman is played by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi who held the main role in Ozon's precedent film, "5x2", 2004). After that, Romain seems to have become another man, he has accepted to belong to the world that surrounds him and appears to be at ease and relieved amid it (see the last almost timeless sequences when he's by the sea). So, if the first part of the film was disturbing, the second one has a placating whiff. Romain's visit to his grandmother is the central and crucial moment between the two. Ozon's camera knows how to capture the situation, the feeling, the gesture, the look and the director has a real genius to let the what is left unsaid show through.

As Romain slowly but surely makes his way towards the adamant death, there are flashes of his childhood which arrive in his mind. Maybe, they help him to accept his own death. Moreover, it is often said that old people behave like children. In a way Romain also behaves like a child, at least in the beginning of the movie, then, there's still time to become a grown-up.

"Le Temps Qui Reste" is a small cracker which maybe won't cater for all tastes because of its thorny topic. But it has the merit to put aside formulaic or corny ingredients. As for Ozon, more power to him although it's very likely that like some of his fellows (Patrice Leconte), he'll still have to wait for a long time to receive the honors he deserves