Biography: life and films
The oldest of four children, François Ozon was born in Paris on 15th November 1967. His father was a biologist, his mother a French teacher. Having taken drama lessons, he decided that an actor's life was not for him and instead chose to become a film director. At university, he studied filmmaking in Paris, where he was coached by, among others, Eric Rohmer and Joseph Morder. During his studies, he made several short films with a Super 8 camera that belonged to his father.
After his graduation, Ozon made a number of inventive short films, one of which, Une robe d'été (1996), he showed at Cannes to great acclaim. It was his subsequent medium-length film, Regarde la mer (1997), a brooding erotic thriller, which established him as one of France's most promising young filmmakers. Ozon's rapidly acquired reputation for subversion was established with his first full length film, Sitcom (1998), a deeply unsettling deconstruction of bourgeois values that was noted for its idiosyncratic stylisation and frank portrayal of sexual deviancy.
Ozon's fascination for the darker, more perverse aspects of human relationships (sexual and otherwise) is even more apparent in his next two films, Les Amants criminels (1999), which feels like an X-rated version of a Brothers Grimm fairytale, and the quasi-theatrical Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes (2000), which won him a Teddy at the Berlin International Film Festival. The latter film is an inspired reinterpretation of an early play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the cult German film director with whom Ozon appears to have much in common. Like Fassbinder, Ozon is far more interested in his female protagonists and finds it more difficult to portray men convincingly in his films (which explains why most of his male characters tend to be grotesques, idealisations or blatant stereotypes). This is most evident in his next two films.
In Sous le sable (2000), Ozon explores, with surprising sensitivity and depth, the intense trauma of bereavement. The film was a gift for its lead actress, Charlotte Rampling, providing not only a boost to her flagging career but also giving Ozon the perfect muse for his most meticulous exploration of the female psyche. Ozon's next film, 8 femmes (2001), could hardly be more different, a brazenly kitsch musical whodunit that brought together some of French cinema's greatest actresses, including Catherine Deneueve, Fanny Ardant, Danielle Darrieux and Isabelle Huppert. Not only did the film receive rave reviews, it was a phenomenal box office success, attracting over 3.7 million spectators in France alone.
Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier, two of Ozon's favourite actresses, headlined the director's next film Swimming Pool (2003), a psychological thriller with a Hitchcockian flavour which, despite some strong performances and a fine script, lacked the inspired touch of Ozon's recent successes. Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage (1973) was to be the inspiration for Ozon's next film, 5x2 (2004), a cruel dissection of a relationship that was distinguished by a strong central performances from Valeria Bruni Tedeschi. In Le Temps qui reste (2005), Ozon offers a sombre meditation on mortality which, for the first time in his oeuvre, is centred exclusively on a male character.
After his next short film Un lever de rideau (2006), Ozon made Angel (2007), his first English language film and his first period piece, a wholesale kitsch-fest inspired by the life of a 19th century woman writer who enjoyed a brief period of success even though her books had absolutely no literary merit. Presumably intended as an ironic commentary on the inherent worth of art, the film received mixed reviews and was not a great success. Ozon's next film, Ricky (2009), is one of his strangest, a disturbing mélange of social drama and fantasy involving a flying baby. The miracle of birth is also the subject of Le Refuge (2010), an intimate portrait of loss and renewal in which Ozon was able to film Isabelle Carré's real-life pregnancy. As innovative as these two films were, neither was a great critical or commercial success. It was with his next film, Potiche (2010), that Ozon won back the critics and his audience, offering a polished film with a stellar cast (Catherine Deneuve, Gerard Dépardieu, Fabrice Luchini...) and some timely observations on society's treatment of women.
By dint of its diversity of themes and styles, the cinema of François Ozon is extremely difficult to classify, and maybe this is its main appeal. The influence of great directors like Bergman and Fassbinder is easily felt, but there is an unsettling lack of uniformity and textual cohesion in Ozon's oeuvre. Ozon is one of the great enigmas of French cinema; each of his films is like one piece of a jigsaw puzzle, but as yet the pieces fail to give a clear picture of the man who created them. There are themes which reverberate throughout his work - a close affinity with the neuroses of women, a morbid fascination for perverse human behaviour, a willingness to blur the boundary between reality and imagination. Yet Ozon still remains something of a mystery. Just when you think you understand him, he makes a film that suggests the contrary, contradicting what has gone before and perhaps revealing a new facet to his persona. Ozon is arguably the most unpredictable and fearless of today's French filmmakers - and that could be why he is so prolific and so greatly admired. In the wonderful world of François Ozon, anything is possible, absolutely anything...
© James Travers 2012
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Filmography
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The very best French thrillers
The Carry On films, from the heyday of British film comedy
