‘When Fall Is Coming' Review: Autumnal Ambiguities

Wall Street Journal

03-04-2025

This year, spring has sprung at American indie cinemas with a pair of French films that are distinctly out of season, colored by the yellow leaves of autumn: Two weeks ago was Alain Guiraudie's 'Misericordia,' and this weekend brings 'When Fall Is Coming,' directed by the prolific François Ozon.
Both involve murder, mushrooms, and a young man who just might be taking advantage of an older woman. But where Mr. Guiraudie is an impish auteur, using mystery and melodrama for his own playfully perverse ends, Mr. Ozon takes a slightly more straightforward approach, and his movie is the less persuasive and compelling of the two. That it is still worthwhile owes largely to the sympathetic, sinuous performance of Hélène Vincent, in the lead role of a grand-mère who may not be as simply sweet as she first appears.
Ms. Vincent's Michelle lives alone in a lovely old house in Burgundy, where she leads a quiet life of gardening, going for walks and reading by the fire, her typical solitude broken only by meetings with her best friend, Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko). But as the film begins, Michelle is expecting visitors, soon to arrive from Paris: her daughter, Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier), and grandson, Lucas (Garlan Erlos). In eager anticipation, Michelle prepares a splendid-looking lunch—mushrooms, freshly foraged and sautéed, and a quiche of epic diameter—and then sits to await the sound of their car pulling up outside.
As written by Mr. Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, Valérie turns out to be a bit of a caricature, the harried adult child who radiates stress and urban frenzy even in the tranquil countryside. She enters the movie complaining about traffic and shortly thereafter lands on the sofa to stare squarely at her phone, scarcely interested in her mother and rudely rebuffing attempts at conversation. When she ends up in the hospital due to the mushrooms served at lunch, it almost seems like a bit of karmic justice.
But could it have been justice of a more deliberate kind? Devised by, say, her own mother? At lunch, Michelle claimed that she wasn't hungry, and she knew that Lucas didn't like mushrooms, which left only Valérie to eat them. The doctors and the police whom Michelle talks to see the incident as an honest mistake, familiar to anyone who has taken a chance on wild fungi. (Which is, it seems, most French people.) But Mr. Ozon delights in tweaking the drama with tacit uncertainties. Didn't we see Michelle consulting a mushroom identification chart as she prepared lunch? Could she have made such a dangerous error?
Valérie neither knows nor cares—all she wants is to return to Paris, which she does as soon as she's out of the hospital, taking Lucas along with her, to the devastation of his grandmother. The film allows a moment of bare emotion for mother and daughter alike following her departure, as we see Michelle in her loneliness at home and Valérie crying as she drives away. There is, we sense, a past of great pain between these two. When the film eventually reveals more about that past, the answers are surprising. But they don't carry much depth, instead tending toward a silly, scandalizing sensibility that Mr. Ozon's generally realist approach can't convey with much credibility.
Still, the film has its strengths: Ms. Vincent and Ms. Balasko make a great, world-weary team as rueful mothers, with Marie-Claude's son, Vincent (Pierre Lottin), having just been released from prison. 'I hate to say it,' Marie-Claude says, 'but with our kids, we failed miserably.' Yet Vincent, at least outwardly swearing off the troublemaking of his youth, is friendly to Michelle, who hires him to do odd jobs around her property. Mr. Lottin leverages the hint of menace beneath his slick handsomeness to create a figure whose seductive ambiguity tilts toward the sinister, which the film puts to engaging use in its continuing twists. And although some work better than others, Ms. Vincent is steadfast in her commitment to a character whose morality and true affections are themselves the stuff of mystery.