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Some people are just better off dead. That’s the ultimate conclusion of the prolific French film-maker François Ozon’s new domestic drama, receiving its world premiere at the San Sebastian Film Festival this week, but delivered with such sly delicacy, such slippery grace — no, actually, such sweetness — that there is simply no arguing with it.
Those qualities – delicacy, grace and sweetness — are largely encapsulated within the tidy person of Michelle (Hélène Vincent, aged 81 in real life and something similar here). Michelle is the heroine of her own small but satisfying life and quite a few other lives besides, a woman with the time and inclination to be kind. On the day we meet her, she is driving her best friend to the prison where her son Vincent (Pierre Lottin) is being held. Visiting a prison is draining. Michelle waits outside, ready to listen to Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) unburden herself when she emerges, convinced her roughneck son will never change. “Have faith in him,” Michelle urges.
Ozon, whose previous films include Potiche, By the Grace of God and Frantz — spanning comedy to melodrama, in other words — has always been a clean, elegant film-maker. When Fall is Coming is minor Ozon — certainly, it is minor-key compared with the fanciful exuberance of Eight Women or the darkness of a film like Swimming Pool — but it doubles down on his customary refinement, fitting together like designer Lego. No word is wasted, no information about the characters overplayed, while the plot unwinds at an exactly calibrated pace, its various reversals chiming in as precisely as solo instruments in an orchestra.
Five minutes in, we already have a vivid picture of Michelle’s life in her country-mouse nest. She takes communion, delves in her vegetable garden, cooks good food for herself and others, goes on forest rambles to pick mushrooms, natters with Marie-Claude and looks forward to seeing her daughter Valerie (Ludivine Sagnier) and grand-son Lucas , a boy of about 11 (Garlan Erlos). A roadside phone call from establishes that Valerie in the throes of divorce. She is also strikingly disagreeable, even in the space of a minute.
So we know already that when Michelle serves her a poisonous mushroom at their lunch and has to have her stomach pumped, she isn’t going to be magnanimous about it, let alone find a funny side: indeed, she accuses her mother of trying to kill her. So grotesque is her fury that Michelle trembles with the thought that perhaps she was. Either that or she is losing her marbles, as she confesses to her doctor. Maybe, as Valerie insists, she should make the house over to her before she gets too dithery.
A grasping adult child, a parent trying to keep the peace: it is a familiar enough scenario, at which point Ozon and co-writer Philippe ring those well-timed changes. There is a death, a confession and, just as the dust seems to have settled, an investigation by a heavily pregnant police officer (Sofia Guillemin). Nobody here knows here exactly what happened on Valerie’s balcony, but everyone instinctively covers for each other; better, perhaps, not to know. There are small revelations confirming earlier hints that Michelle has a shadowed past; she is not the unimpeachable granny figure suggested by her perfect quiches and enthusiasm for games.
Piled up in one paragraph, with all these twists and hidden identities jostling with a dead body — and in addition, as one of the director’s characteristic indulgences, the occasional appearance of a ghost — the makings of When Fall is Coming suggest that it’s a chilly thriller. On the contrary, it unfolds as gently as autumnal leaves drifting to the forest floor. The trees turn russet; the firelight glows. Michelle, her grandson, her daughter’s former husband and her friend’s errant son have been able to form a family, imperfect perhaps but free from strife. In a quiet coda set almost a decade later, Michelle herself is shown aging, ready to pass as all life must. This is John Keats’s “season of mists and mellow fruitfulness”, the calm after summer’s storms.
Title: When Fall is Coming
Festival: San Sebastian (Competition)
International Sales: Playtime
Distributor: Lazona Pictures and Caramel Films (Spain)
Director/screenwriter: François Ozon
Cast: Hélène Vincent, Josiane Balasko, Ludivine Sagnier, Pierre Lottin, Garlan Erlos, Sophie Guillemin
Running time: 1 hr 42 mins
