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July 26, 2006

Time To Leave

Francois Ozon's latest work treads where dozens of weepy Hallmark movies have gone before, but it succeeds so beautifully because it underwhelms. In telling the story of a photographer who chooses to give in to his terminal case of cancer, Ozon doesn't go for hystrionics; nor does he challenge our expectations. The film proceeds exactly as one might expect, from beginning to end, and is marked with what I'd identify as a sort of austere Gallic sentimentality (see also: Patrice Leconte) that is stripped down, stylistically, but doesn't entirely avoid getting worked up by its own emotions. It pushes buttons, but does so very discreetly.

Taking this median approach, the film will leave you feeling moved but not manipulated, sad but not devastated, thoughtful but not terribly intelectually stimulated. And yet it sticks; days later, I'm still thinking about it. The lump that it left in my throat, the one that didn't melt into outright tears, is still there, minor though it may be. Ozon is too sensitive a filmmaker to make a purely ordinary film about this subject; he wouldn't have made it if he didn't have something to say about death and dying, and while he's not one for pedagogy, he knows how to sink his hooks where they matter, to push them past the pellicle of sentimentality and into truth.

One of those moments is just a fragment, a single shot of a baby nursing at its mother's breast. Dreyer used the same image to beautiful effect in The Passion Of Joan Of Arc, and in the eighty years between that film and this one, it's scarecely been utilized - it seems almost stigmatized, in fact. It therefore communicates its intended meaning with a delicate, rarified sort of immediacy that transcends its intended (and fairly obvious) meaning; it transcends transcendence, in fact, and slips out of the realm of symbolism. Although it plays directly into one of the film's subplots (hinted at in the very Photoshopped poster), it functions simultaneously on an entirely separate level, and becomes one of the film's defining images.

The other scenes that hooked me were the ones where the photographer (Melvil Poupaud) visits his grandmother, played by the legendary Jeanne Moreau. She's the only person to whom he tells of his condition, over the course of a visit that we sense has been put off for a long time. As she takes her regiment of pills and prescriptions, she tells him she wishes they could slip off together that very night; later she changes her mind and asks him to reconsider chemotherapy. He maintains his position, and the next morning, as they're saying their goodbyes, he takes a picture of her and bursts into tears. He'll spend a fair amount of time crying throughout the rest of the film, but this is the first time since he received the bad news. At this point, though, he's not crying because he is going to die; that's part of it, certainly, on some level, but the immediate cause of his tears is simply that he and she both know that, regardless of who dies first, they will never see each other again. Death is irrelevant in that moment, and it just about broke my heart. In fact, it's breaking my heart writing about it right now, and I have to stop.

* * *

Sentences that I wrote that didn't make it into this review:

The most selfish tragedy of death, after all, is not that we're gone, but that everyone else is left behind.

Every artist makes at least one work dealing with their own mortality, and the good ones make their death our own; they transpose their fears and worries onto us, and their work becomes universally therapeutic.

* * *

The trailers before Time To Leave were particularly good. I love the Science Of Sleep preview, and that was followed by one for Andrew Bujalski's Mutual Appreciation, which I didn't realize was about to get a theatrical release. And then there was one I hadn't seen before...the ThinkFilm logo, a digital cityscape, and then...

From the director of Hedwig And The Angry Inch...

That was all I needed to see.

One of the best things I've done in LA is sit at home and watch Hedwig on IFC with Curtis and Valerie. It had been too long since I'd last seen it.

Posted by David Lowery at July 26, 2006 09:55 PM

Comments

Posted by: girish at July 30, 2006 06:16 AM

Posted by: Ghostboy at July 30, 2006 11:35 PM