Some persons are simply higher off lifeless. That’s the final word conclusion of the prolific French film-maker François Ozon’s new home drama, receiving its world premiere on the San Sebastian Movie Pageant this week, however delivered with such sly delicacy, such slippery grace — no, really, such sweetness — that there’s merely no arguing with it.
These qualities – delicacy, grace and sweetness — are largely encapsulated inside the tidy particular person of Michelle (Hélène Vincent, aged 81 in actual life and one thing related right here). Michelle is the heroine of her personal small however satisfying life and fairly a number of different lives in addition to, a girl with the time and inclination to be variety. On the day we meet her, she is driving her greatest buddy to the jail the place her son Vincent (Pierre Lottin) is being held. Visiting a jail is draining. Michelle waits exterior, able to hearken to Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) unburden herself when she emerges, satisfied her roughneck son won’t ever change. “Think about him,” Michelle urges.
Ozon, whose earlier movies embody Potiche, By the Grace of God and Frantz — spanning comedy to melodrama, in different phrases — has all the time been a clear, elegant film-maker. When Fall is Coming is minor Ozon — definitely, it’s minor-key in contrast with the fanciful exuberance of Eight Girls or the darkness of a movie like Swimming Pool — nevertheless it doubles down on his customary refinement, becoming collectively like designer Lego. No phrase is wasted, no details about the characters overplayed, whereas the plot unwinds at an precisely calibrated tempo, its numerous reversals chiming in as exactly as solo devices in an orchestra.
5 minutes in, we have already got a vivid image of Michelle’s life in her country-mouse nest. She takes communion, delves in her vegetable backyard, cooks good meals for herself and others, goes on forest rambles to select mushrooms, natters with Marie-Claude and appears ahead to seeing her daughter Valerie (Ludivine Sagnier) and grand-son Lucas , a boy of about 11 (Garlan Erlos). A roadside cellphone name from establishes that Valerie within the throes of divorce. She can be strikingly unpleasant, even within the area of a minute.
So we all know already that when Michelle serves her a toxic mushroom at their lunch and has to have her abdomen pumped, she isn’t going to be magnanimous about it, not to mention discover a humorous facet: certainly, she accuses her mom of making an attempt to kill her. So grotesque is her fury that Michelle trembles with the thought that maybe she was. Both that or she is dropping her marbles, as she confesses to her physician. Possibly, as Valerie insists, she ought to make the home over to her earlier than she will get too dithery.
A greedy grownup youngster, a father or mother making an attempt to maintain the peace: it’s a acquainted sufficient situation, at which level Ozon and co-writer Philippe ring these well-timed adjustments. There’s a demise, a confession and, simply because the mud appears to have settled, an investigation by a closely pregnant police officer (Sofia Guillemin). No one right here is aware of right here precisely what occurred on Valerie’s balcony, however everybody instinctively covers for one another; higher, maybe, to not know. There are small revelations confirming earlier hints that Michelle has a shadowed previous; she will not be the unimpeachable granny determine advised by her good quiches and enthusiasm for video games.
Piled up in a single paragraph, with all these twists and hidden identities jostling with a lifeless physique — and as well as, as one of many director’s attribute indulgences, the occasional look of a ghost — the makings of When Fall is Coming recommend that it’s a cold thriller. Quite the opposite, it unfolds as gently as autumnal leaves drifting to the forest flooring. The bushes flip russet; the firelight glows. Michelle, her grandson, her daughter’s former husband and her buddy’s errant son have been in a position to type a household, imperfect maybe however free from strife. In a quiet coda set virtually a decade later, Michelle herself is proven getting older, able to move as all life should. That is John Keats’s “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, the calm after summer time’s storms.
Title: When Fall is Coming
Pageant: San Sebastian (Competitors)
Worldwide Gross sales: Playtime
Distributor: Lazona Footage and Caramel Movies (Spain)
Director/screenwriter: François Ozon
Solid: Hélène Vincent, Josiane Balasko, Ludivine Sagnier, Pierre Lottin, Garlan Erlos, Sophie Guillemin
Operating time: 1 hr 42 minutes
