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New York Times
03-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘When Fall is Coming' Review: Cooking Up a Mystery
For 'When Fall Is Coming,' the French filmmaker François Ozon has cooked up a little mystery and an enigmatic heroine. A sleek, modestly scaled entertainment about families, secrets and obligations, it features fine performances and some picture-postcard Burgundian locations. It's there in the heart of France, in a picturesque village in a large, pretty house, that Michelle (Hélène Vincent) makes her home. With her kind eyes, guileless smile and upswept hair, she looks the very picture of a sweet old lady. Looks can be deceiving, though, as we're reminded, and as Ozon's movie goes along, that picture grows amusingly slyer. Ozon's efficiency and polished style are among his appeals — his films include 'Under the Sand' and 'Swimming Pool' — and he lays out this movie with silky ease. In precise, illustrative scenes he takes you on the rounds with Michelle, mapping her pleasant environs, charting her routines and introducing her small circle of intimates, including another local, Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko), a longtime, charmingly earthy friend. For the most part, the pieces fit together, though a few things seem off. For one, Marie-Claude's son, Vincent (Pierre Lottin), is in jail when the movie opens (though soon out); for another, Michelle's daughter, Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier), is viscerally, inexplicably, hostile to her mother. Michelle's life and the setup seem so pacific that the movie initially teeters on the soporific; which works as a sneaky bit of misdirection. Because just when everything seems a little too frictionless, someone prepares poisonous mushrooms for lunch, and someone else eats them, a turn that puts you on alert (where you stay). Ozon, who also wrote the script, continues to lightly thicken the plot but also withholds information, and before you know it, this obvious story has become an intrigue. One bad thing leads to another (and another), and the air crackles with menace. Michelle and Valérie argue, Marie-Claude falls seriously ill, Vincent takes a suspicious trip. Yet the more that things happen, the less you know. Ozon sprinkles the story with hints, summons up the ghost of Claude Chabrol (bonjour!) and, during one vividly hued autumn walk, evokes Grimm's fairy-tale 'Snow-White and Rose-Red,' about two sisters. He also foregrounds doubles: The sisterly Michelle and Marie-Claude don't have partners, and each has a difficult adult kid. Despite their nominal similarities, Valérie and Vincent are notably different; he and his mom are openly loving, for one. By contrast, the minute that Valérie and her son, Lucas (Garlan Erlos), drive in from Paris to visit Michelle, the mood turns ugly. Valérie is petulant and nakedly greedy, and she soon asks for Michelle's house. 'I'll owe less in taxes when you die,' she says before taking a swig of wine. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times. Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Already a subscriber? Log in. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
The Independent
20-03-2025
- Entertainment
- The Independent
François Ozon: ‘I was a very perverse child – I loved the idea of my aunt trying to kill us all'
When he was still in his teens, sometime in the late Eighties, the filmmaker François Ozon asked his little brother to kill their family for him. Before anyone panics, this was play-acting, and for a movie. Photo de Famille was a scrappy, seven-minute blueprint for the kinds of films that would, a decade later, transform Ozon into the mischievous French prince of lust, provocation and psychosexual chaos. His brother agreed to it. As did his family. In the film, 'my brother gave some poison to my mother and smothered my father', Ozon remembers. 'And he cut the throat of my sister with a pair of scissors.' Did they mind participating in such a thing? Ozon grins. 'My mother said, 'yes, we will do that in your film because we know you wouldn't do that in reality'.' Even with that origin story in mind, Ozon's creative penchant for sex and death tends to be overstated. Yes, the 57-year-old's most internationally successful movies – the candy-coloured whodunnit 8 Women (2002), or the Charlotte Rampling murder mystery Swimming Pool (2003) – are awash in the stuff, but his output bends more diverse. There's the bittersweet coming-of-age tale (2020's Summer of 85), the Hitchcockian psycho-thriller (2017's Double Lover), the other one involving Rampling and a body of water (the tender, mesmeric Under the Sand from 2000). He's made more or less a film a year since 1997, and likes to sew a degree of tonal unease into most of them. Just when you're getting comfortable in a particular genre, out comes another one. Take When Autumn Falls, his 24th feature, which is in cinemas this week. It begins as a bucolic slice-of-life drama, with Hélène Vincent – playing Michelle, a retiree and devoted grandmother – tending to her garden and meeting with friends in a village in Burgundy. Then her stressed daughter Valérie (Swimming Pool 's Ludivine Sagnier) arrives, then a poisonous mushroom lands her grandson in hospital, then her very dysfunctional past comes to light. There are apparitions and police interrogations. Cryptic ex-cons fresh from jail. By the time a character mysteriously plummets to their death at the midpoint of When Autumn Falls, all you can do is let the film's pure, unadulterated Ozoniness wash over you. The film was loosely inspired by an incident in Ozon's own childhood, in which his aunt accidentally poisoned several members of the family with wild mushrooms. 'I loved the idea of my aunt trying to kill us all,' he laughs. 'I was a very perverse child, as you can see. Or just a future director.' Sitting in the corner of the cavernous library of London's French Institute, Ozon is dressed in a crimson jacket and black trousers, a scarf wrapped tightly around his neck. His sunglasses are on, and mostly stay on. Looking at Ozon is akin to looking at an illustration of a Frenchman drawn from memory, and he speaks in a boyish, lightly dishy register. He tells me he loved working with the 81-year-old Vincent on the film because she really looks like an 81-year-old. 'Some French actresses have so much plastic surgery that they don't have age anymore,' he says. 'I won't give you names, but you know who I'm thinking of, don't you?' He giggles. 'And I've worked with them!' In all seriousness, though, he says he understands social and industry pressure to maintain a youthful appearance, but also loves lines and loose skin – he'd sometimes shoot Vincent in extreme close-up just to show it off. 'That's not possible for some actresses. Sometimes you prefer not to go too close with the camera because it's not real anymore. You don't see the expression.' Whether their faces move or not, female actors of a certain age have lined up to work with Ozon for more than 20 years, ever since he revitalised Rampling's career with Under the Sand. He was in his early thirties at that point, but had enough resolve to insist upon her casting despite worry from the film's backers. 'She was considered, at that time, totally forgotten,' he says. 'Her career was stopped. All the French financiers said to me, 'don't work with her – she's finished'. Helpfully, I didn't follow them, and the film was successful.' That led to 8 Women, in which he pulled together a murderer's row of divas – including Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Béart – to play the suspects in a country house crime. 'When the cast was announced, everybody wanted to come to the set to see the catfights,' he laughs. 'All the media was convinced it would be a disaster, and impossible with so many egos on the same film. But they were wrong.' He thinks it would have been different if it were called 8 Men. 'Actresses are clever. They are cinephiles. They are not afraid to work with young directors. Men?' He shrugs. 'The egos of male actors can be huge. For women, there is a kind of sisterhood and solidarity.' 8 Women arrived at a time in Ozon's career that saw him shift away from the barbed, button-pushing sensibility that had defined his early work – 1998's Sitcom, which shot him to fame, was an overheated satire of the modern family, boasting orgies, sadomasochism and full-frontal nudity. It saw him dubbed the enfant terrible of Nineties French filmmaking, with more shades of his American contemporary Todd Solondz than an Éric Rohmer or a Michel Audiard. 'I was looking for me,' he says. 'It was instinctive. Maybe I was more provocative in the form?' He shrugs again, admitting that he struggles to look back at his older films. 'They are like children I've abandoned,' he laughs, 'and I don't analyse them.' He points at me. 'That is your job.' He's evolved, at least. Much like Spain's Pedro Almodóvar – who, god forbid, panned away from a sex scene in one of his recent films – Ozon's modern eroticism tends to be a little more tasteful than it used to be. It's not by design, he insists. It's cultural. 'You can see so many sex scenes on your telephone today, so sex naturally felt more transgressive 20 years ago. Sometimes I think directors would actually welcome back the Hays Code [the puritanical guidelines for American filmmakers in force between the years of 1934 and 1968] just so you can rebel against something.' The filming of sex scenes is also changing, as he's learnt while planning his next movie, an adaptation of Albert Camus' The Outsider. 'I need to work with a coordinator of intimacy,' he says. 'It didn't exist before.' He says he's not had an issue with shooting them himself. 'I always share information with my actors – what position I want them in, which part of the body I want to show, and I ask for their point of view. It's never been a problem. But it's better now – there are some directors, especially in French cinema, who push the limits when it comes to making sex scenes.' That's partly because filmmakers in France, he says, hold enormous cultural and social sway. People don't tend to say no. 'The director is king. We have the power.' And it's also one of the reasons he's never been tempted by America, despite fielding offers to direct Hollywood films in the aftermath of Swimming Pool. 'All they proposed to me were remakes, or erotic thrillers that would mean I was repeating myself.' And, he says while finally slipping off his sunglasses, 'I wouldn't have final cut.' It's a power thing, he adds. 'As a filmmaker, you have none in America. There, the director worships the producer. It is the director who helps the producer to win an Oscar.' He hoots, dismissively. This is a man who convinced his family to die on camera in the living room for him – fat chance anyone's going to be able to boss him around.
BBC News
31-01-2025
- Business
- BBC News
Hope of secure future for swimming pool after council takeover
The future of a community-run swimming pool would be secured by putting it under council control, it has been Yorkshire Council is due to take on the running of Richmond Swimming Pool on 1 March, following issues with rising costs and upgrade work at the venue in recent facility will be the latest in the county to be taken in-house following the launch of the unitary authority in councillor Stuart Parsons said the transfer to council control was a "good move", which would see an "almost seamless changeover". Similar venues in Selby, Tadcaster, Harrogate, Knaresborough and Ripon, have already been taken on by North Yorkshire Council under its Active North Yorkshire council is also set to take control of adjacent Liberty Health Club in Richmond from 1 Richmond pool and gym are currently operated by Richmondshire Leisure Trust, with the charity given the lease by the former Richmondshire District Council in recent years, trust bosses have warned that rising costs and fewer users had threatened the future of the to the Local Democracy Reporting Service the former district council came under fire in 2022 for giving the trust almost 5% of its income to run the services — and then having to provide an extra £75,000 in funding to cover a 400% increase in energy council also agreed to pay compensation to the trust of up to £85,000 due to lost income from issues with a £1.9m revamp, which included a new heating system and solar panels on the roof. 'Enhance lives' Parsons said he had "felt sorry" for Richmondshire Leisure added: "They were created on the understanding they could access funding that the council couldn't, but that wasn't really the case."Trust bosses said the facilities were being handed over in good shape with a record number of gym users and the highest number of swimmers using the pool for several years, despite a decline in swimming of Richmondshire Leisure Trust, Andy White, said: "As these special and vital facilities transfer to new management, we hope that they will continue to enhance the lives of all who are involved in their provision."Council officers said the swimming pool and health club would operate as normal during the transition and memberships and opening hours would remain to highlights from North Yorkshire on BBC Sounds, catch up with the latest episode of Look North or tell us a story you think we should be covering here.
