A journey to the past with François Ozon | Little White Lies

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A jour­ney to the past with François Ozon

20 Oct 2020

Words by Elena Lazic

Two youths in leather jackets, one in striped shirt, shouting on stage with illuminated backdrop.
Two youths in leather jackets, one in striped shirt, shouting on stage with illuminated backdrop.
To cel­e­brate the release of Sum­mer of 85, we explore Ozon’s var­i­ous height­ened depic­tions of days gone by.

Pas­tel colours, fresh-faced ado­les­cents, tanned skin and sun­sets by the beach: François Ozon’s lat­est film Sum­mer of 85 brings togeth­er all the ele­ments of the 1980s French teen movie in a nos­tal­gic, fizzy mix, by turns bit­ter and sweet. The film sees Alex­is (Felix Lefeb­vre, a tal­ent to watch) recount the dra­mat­ic sto­ry of his first love and how it led to him end­ing up in hand­cuffs, sit­ting out­side a courthouse.

Fil­tered through his own sub­jec­tive view­point – and that of Ozon him­self – 1980s France appears like a place and time both idyl­lic and cru­el, dream­like yet at times dis­turbing­ly vio­lent. The direc­tor takes on and shakes up the tropes of French teen movies from the era, such as 1980’s La Boum, direct­ly ref­er­enced in the film’s love­ly club scene. But Ozon being Ozon, Sum­mer of 85 is far from a straight­for­ward pas­tiche and, while lov­ing­ly refer­ring to and bor­row­ing from a dat­ed type of cin­e­ma, the direc­tor inevitably imbues his depic­tion with his own flavour, queer­ing it in more ways than one.

Alex­is’ lover is David (Ben­jamin Voisin), a dash­ing young man slight­ly old­er than our hero, who is equipped with the con­fi­dence and easy-going atti­tude which the per­pet­u­al­ly anx­ious and death-obsessed Alex­is sore­ly lacks. But before our pro­tag­o­nist even begins to feel the first fris­sons of love and attrac­tion for his new, allur­ing friend, the man­ner in which the film teas­es the pos­si­bil­i­ty of romance feels point­ed­ly self-aware, as if Ozon had con­scious­ly set out to take the fre­quent homo­erot­ic under­tones of so many teen movies from the era and bring them out into the open.

The film’s entire aes­thet­ic, its melo­dra­mat­ic sto­ry of lust and rejec­tion, and the inten­si­ty of Alex­is’ voice-over as he recounts the whole trag­ic affair make Sum­mer of 85 both a thrilling­ly sin­cere and poignant tale of naïve ado­les­cent love and self-dis­cov­ery, and a refresh­ing­ly know­ing, camp play with arti­fice and intertextuality.

But this isn’t the first time the French direc­tor has put his own reflex­ive spin on dusty film gen­res, play­ful­ly bring­ing out their queer poten­tial while revis­it­ing their respec­tive eras and rev­el­ling in the cin­e­mat­ic plea­sures they offer. One of his most pop­u­lar films, 2002’s 8 Women, was orig­i­nal­ly imag­ined as a remake of George Cuckor’s 1939 film The Women, a com­e­dy-dra­ma fea­tur­ing an all-female cast and which unveils the wheel­ings and deal­ings through which mem­bers of the weak­er sex” man­age to get what they want in a world dom­i­nat­ed by men.

Ozon’s film, based on a 1958 play by French writer Robert Thomas, treads remark­ably sim­i­lar ter­ri­to­ry, and while 8 Women does fea­ture a male char­ac­ter, he is dead, and so much less inter­est­ing than the eight female occu­pants of the snow­bound cot­tage where his appar­ent mur­der has tak­en place.

Set in 1950s France, the film trans­lates the vivid tech­ni­col­or of the melo­dra­mas of Dou­glas Sirk onto the cos­tumes and sets them­selves, exag­ger­at­ing the styles of the era to the point where the out­fits almost look like par­ty cos­tumes. This reflex­iv­i­ty goes hand in glove with the film’s the­atri­cal­i­ty, as well as its play with the real life per­sonas of its cast: Danielle Darieux was a queen of actu­al 1950s melo­dra­mas, appear­ing in Max Ophüls’ La Ronde, Le Plaisir and Madame De…, while Emmanuelle Béart is an icon in her own right, a femme fatale for­ev­er remem­bered as the gor­geous Manon des Sources. Like­wise Isabelle Hup­pert, the cere­bral French actress par excel­lence, excels here in one of her ear­li­est of many bouts of self-par­o­dy, as a neu­rot­ic woman suf­fer­ing from tachycardia.

A woman in a checked print dress sitting on a pink chaise longue in a richly decorated room with patterned curtains.

Ozon used Cather­ine Deneuve, the incar­na­tion of French ele­gance, in anoth­er one of his play­ful takes on bygone film gen­res and eras. Potiche (2010) is a tongue-in-cheek com­men­tary on the way charm and beau­ty are used to keep women in their place – be they Cather­ine Deneuve her­self, the potiche” or tro­phy wife she plays in the film, or women at large.

As the new boss of her ail­ing husband’s umbrel­la fac­to­ry, Deneuve’s Suzanne Pujol is a clear ref­er­ence to the actress’ role in Jacques Demy’s The Umbrel­las of Cher­bourg, while the cast’s out­fits, hair­styles, the set design and often soft focus cin­e­matog­ra­phy are so 1970s it hurts. The sub­texts of sex come­dies from the era is here made text by Ozon, as char­ac­ters open­ly dis­cuss fem­i­nism and pow­er dynam­ics, while the the­atri­cal­i­ty of the mise-en-scene fur­ther brings out the film’s camp self-aware­ness and play with cin­e­mat­ic and peri­od signifiers.

Ozon’s inter­est in char­ac­ters – in par­tic­u­lar women – chal­leng­ing het­ero­nor­ma­tive norms took on a less flam­boy­ant and more insid­i­ous form in a recent trio of films about unusu­al women who ful­ly own their sex­u­al­i­ty. Set in the present day, Jeune & Jolie (2013), The New Girl­friend (2014) and L’Amant Dou­ble (2017) evoke the cin­e­mat­ic past more through elab­o­rate film style than peri­od detail, bor­row­ing their visu­al style from the cin­e­ma of Bri­an de Pal­ma and tak­ing the erot­ic thriller into a dis­tinct­ly French, out­ra­geous­ly trans­gres­sive direction.

The direc­tor returned to the past in Frantz (2016) one of his more restrained explo­rations of an archa­ic film style. Set in the inter­war peri­od and shot in black-and-white, this somber dra­ma bor­rows more straight­for­ward­ly from films of that era – unusu­al­ly for Ozon, it fea­tures no sex scenes at all. In its sto­ry of a man and woman who meet through their con­nec­tion to a third, dead man, the film nat­u­ral­ly recalls Alfred Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go, but in its aus­tere visu­al style, sub­tle per­for­mances and roman­tic momen­tum, it resem­bles more close­ly the war dra­mas of the peri­od, from Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch and Jean Renoir.

With Sum­mer of 85 now on release and time itself appear­ing some­what frozen, this might be the ide­al moment to explore the cin­e­mat­ic worlds of Fran­cois Ozon, con­sum­mate­ly enter­tain­ing films which play­ful­ly dance through both cin­e­mat­ic and his­tor­i­cal time.

Sum­mer of 85 is in UK Cin­e­mas and on Cur­zon Home Cin­e­ma from Fri­day 23 October.

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