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TIME TO LEAVE
Directed & Written by: François Ozon.
Produced by: Oliver Delbosc & Marc Missonnier.
Director of Photography: Jeanne Lapoirie.
Edited by: Monica Coleman.
Music by: Valentin Slivestrov.
Released by: Strand Releasing.
Language: French with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: France. 85 min. Not Rated.
With: Melvil Poupaud, Jeanne Moreau, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, Daniel Duval, Marie Riviére & Christian Sengewald.

Director François Ozon’s latest deconstruction proves a beautiful star can always be counted on to help sustain interest, no matter how exasperating the character may be. With his head tilted to highlight his cheek bones just so, French star Melvil Poupaud is so photogenic that it is entirely plausible that a stranger would approach him to father her child or that a straight man would, without much nudging, join him in a bedroom romp.

On his rooftop set, 31-year-old photographer Romain (Poupaud), hair slicked back and wearing impenetrable shades, has just began a fashion shoot before he collapses. Refraining from any emotion, he takes in the doctor’s diagnosis: he has a malignant tumor and less than a five percent chance of survival. Romain’s indifferent behavior at a family dinner may again thwart the viewer’s dramatic expectations. Instead of revealing his news or even making small talk, he lashes out at his sister at the least provocation. Ozon ups the ante by making Roman’s family as generous as possible; both parents ask Romain about his boyfriend and he even buys a dime-bag from a drug dealer in front of his father.

By the time Romain makes love and then abruptly and violently breaks up with his lover – explaining that he’s bored – you may want to shout die already at the screen. But intermittently, Ozon reveals another, more vulnerable Romain through private moments. Just when you’re about to give up on him, Romain, in his own fashion, becomes more interested in others than himself.

The film is just as manipulating as Romain. The viewer is constantly being pulled in and pulled away. (It makes sense his job is one that directs and controls an image.) Far from being a victim, he pulls the strings of his family by not telling them he’s dying; he confidently believes he knows what their reaction will be and will have none of it: his mother will smother him, his sister will baby him, and his taciturn father will further withdraw. And like the dying Bette Davis in Dark Victory, illness becomes Romain. He’s like a younger, leaner Eric Bana.

In the requisite coke-in-the-bathroom scene, Romain looks in the mirror and sees the reflection of himself as a young boy, wide-eyed and curly haired. The moments where he literally sees the child within himself are as close to pathos as the film gets. When you think the film is veering towards sentimentality, Ozon mischievously changes direction, as in Romain’s memory of a church, where the younger Romain finds a new use for a baptismal.

Ozon transplants the melodrama genre to the here and now, taking a sentimental form and adding frank sexuality (is that a prosthetic Mr. Poupard or are you in the moment?) and a steely attitude. A reinvention rather than a re-creation, this is in another universe altogether than Todd Haynes’ Douglas Sirk homage Far From Heaven. The message is not death, be not proud, but death, love me or leave me. Kent Turner
July 14, 2006