The Instant Expert's Guide to François Ozon

With his 57th birthday falling on 15 November and The Crime Is Mine continuing its run on the big screen, it's time that Cinema Paradiso provided an Instant Expert's Guide to François Ozon.

When asked by an interviewer if he ever thinks about his old films, François Ozon replied, 'No, I'm a very bad father, I abandon all my children. Right now I'm in the present, and the future - what's past is past.'

We're not quite so averse to harking back at Cinema Paradiso. But Ozon isn't an easy film-maker to define, as he keeps us guessing as to where he's going to go next. As we shall see, he started out as a provocateur, but he has evolved into a storytelling auteur, whose inventiveness and versatility have seen him flit over the last 30 years from intimate chamber drama to crime thriller, lavish period piece to hard-hitting socio-political exposé, and character comedy to musical whodunit.

The Ozon Layer

François Ozon was born in Paris on 15 November 1967. He was the oldest of five children and his brother and three sisters were encouraged to think for themselves by their middle-class teacher parents, René and Anne-Marie. As his mother taught French literature, François soon discovered the joys of reading. 'I was so curious as a young child,' he later recalled, 'and I was a dreamer, and books were a way to discover the other side of my reality. It's like finding the secret behind the door. My problem with literature now is that I'm always thinking as a director, so when I read a book I'm viewing it through a director's prism: would it make a good movie? When I was young and only dreaming of becoming a director I could be fully lost in a book.'

As the Ozons refused to censor their children's viewing, François graduated from his early love of Disney animations to becoming a fan of Tarzan and Sissi, the character played by Romy Schneider in Ernst Mareschka's trilogy about the Empress Elisabeth of Austria - Sissi (1955), Sissi: The Young Empress (1956), and Sissi: Fateful Years of an Empress (1957). He also remembers furtively viewing Roberto Rossellini's Germany Year Zero (1947) and being shocked that a boy of his age would commit suicide. Indeed, such was François's fixation with films that being barred from watching them was the ultimate punishment - although this reinforced the sense of cinema as a forbidden thrill.

Anne-Marie (whose maiden name just happened to be Godard) regularly bought the magazine, L'Avant-scène cinéma, which illustrated the scripts of classic and contemporary features. Poring over its pages, François discovered Claude Chabrol's lesbian saga, Les Biches (1968), which would remain an influential film. Around this time, he also started to commandeer René's Super 8 camera to call the shots on the family's holiday movies.

Although he did some modelling as a child and appeared in school plays, François disliked being in the spotlight and preferred to pull strings behind the scenes. Yet, while he knew from his teens that he wanted to direct films, he was embarrassed by his ambition and daunted by the notion that putting his ideas on celluloid would reveal his secret thoughts and desires. Such doubts chimed in with the fact that the young Ozon's boyhood was sometimes troubled. He set light to the bathroom at his middle school and occasionally got into trouble with the police over petty thefts. Moreover, he also ran away from home several times, as he kicked against parental authority.

However, Ozon settled down in his later teens and completed his schooling before studying cinema at the Université de Paris I, where his tutors included underground film-maker Joseph Morder, who encouraged students to make short films. While writing his masters on Maurice Pialat, Ozon completed around 30 Super 8 shorts, which took a couple of hours to write and a weekend to shoot, with casts made up of family and friends. On one occasion, Ozon even cast himself as a cross-dresser.

Three of these films were personally selected by the director as extras when a boxed set of his first four features was released in France. A 12-minute study of bulimia, Les Doigts dans le ventre (aka Fingers in the Stomach, 1988) starred Ozon's friend Judith Cahen and was filmed in various locations around Paris in imitation of Agnès Varda's Cléo de 5 à 7 (1961). In Mes Parents un jour d'été (aka My Parents on a Summer Day, 1990), Anne-Marie considers pushing René to his death after a hotly contested game of Scrabble. The most striking short, however, was Photo de famille (aka Family Portraits, 1988), which was filmed in the Ozon home and opens with the parents watching Gérard Depardieu in Maurice Pialat's Sous le soleil de Satan (Under the Sun of Satan, 1987) with their daughter, Julie, and culminates in them all being murdered by son Guillaume.

Short Cuts

In 1990, Ozon won a place at La Fondation Européenne pour les Métiers de l'Image et du Son. Better known as La Fémis, this was the successor to the hugely influential IDHEC film school and Ozon was fortunate to have nouvelle vague directors Éric Rohmer and Jacques Rivette among his tutors, along with the actor-director, Jean Douchet. He has revealed in interviews that Rohmer (who is also the subject of an Instant Expert's Guide ) was most useful for the practical information he imparted about managing budgets and being able to find cheap props. In fact, Ozon's favourite New Wave director was Claude Chabrol (another Instant Expert subject), as he explained: 'Chabrol was important because he was able to make very strong portraits of women and very complex portraits of women. He was very clever and he had a lot of joy and pleasure. He didn't have some big theories about his work, he just enjoyed making films. I try to work like that.'

Another admired auteur was Maurice Pialat, whose Passe ton bac d'abord (Graduate First, 1978) reflected Ozon's college experience. During this period, Ozon completed seven shorts, including Une goutte de sang (aka A Drop of Blood), Peau contre peau (aka Skin Against Skin), Le Trou madame (aka Madame's Hole), Deux plus un (aka Two Plus One, all 1991), and Thomas reconstitué (aka Thomas Reconstruced, 1992). None of this quintet has ever been made available for public consumption, as was later the case with the documentary, Jospin s'éclaire (aka Jospin Lights Up, 1995).

The other two, Victor (1993) and Une rose entre nous (aka A Rose Between Us, 1994), have been shown and launched his collaboration with classmate Yannick Le Saux as cinematographer. Echoing Photo de famille, the former centres on a troubled young man who shoots his parents and maintains the pretence that they are still alive with the help of a maid and an elderly gardener. It has much in common with Luis Buñuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972), while the latter was the first Ozon film with a gay subtext, as it follows a timid hairdresser's apprentice as he gains in self-confidence after discovering that the female friend who had pimped him out to a businessman had cheated him over the fee.

Ozon's college work established his reputation for short films and he continued to work in the format for the next couple of years. Seven of these works have been gathered by the BFI under the title Regard la mer (2008), which is currently unavailable to rent. Running just four minutes, Action vérité (aka Truth or Dare, 1994) shows how a childish game has a profound impact on four teenagers exploring their sexuality, while the 24-minute La Petite morte (aka Little Death, 1995) turns on a gay photographer's decision to pay a visit to the dying father who had disowned him.

Made the same year and much more widely seen, Une robe d'été (aka A Summer Dress, 1995) was a 15-minute dramedy that reveals what happens when a man (Frédéric Mangenot) holidaying with his older boyfriend (Sébastien Charles) has his clothes stolen during a moment of passion with a Spanish stranger (Lucia Sanchez). In addition to screening at Cannes, the film was also nominated for a César. The prestigious Cahiers du Cinéma rhapsodised about it. 'It is a summery sexual comedy about the articulation of adolescent desire,' it said, 'presented with insolence, humour, lightness, frankness, elegance, poetry, a combination which is extremely rare in French cinema.' Ozon later divulged, 'I wanted it to be, a joyful and colourful film about summer, which deals with the sexual ambivalence of teenage years, free of guilt.'

The chance meeting is less felicitous, however, in Regarde la mer (See the Sea, 1996), a simmering 52-minute psychological thriller set on the on the remote Ile d'Yeu in the Atlantic. When her husband goes away on business, Sasha (Sasha Hails) agrees to let Tatiana (Marina de Van) pitch her tent in the garden. Initially, the Englishwoman is wary of the drifter. But she allows her into the house and pays a chilling price that earned Ozon comparisons with Ingmar Bergman, as well as Alfred Hitchcock, Henri-Georges Clouzot, Roman Polanski, and Claude Chabrol.

Two years later, Ozon made Scènes de lit (aka Bed Scenes) and X2000 (both 1998). Lasting 26 minutes, the former adopted a sketch format, as it explored the ways in which people interact before, during, and after sex. Made as part of a series of shorts about Y2K, the latter had a vaguely sci-fi feel to it. Centring on a naked couple who are presented as a millennial variation on Adam and Eve, the film has an ant connection to Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí's Un chien andalou (1929).

Over the years, Ozon has also made L'Homme idéal (aka The Ideal Man, both 1996), Les Puceaux (aka The Virgins, 1998) and Quand la peur dévore l'âme (When Fear Eats the Soul, 2007). However, only the 25-minue Un léver de rideau (aka Curtain Raiser, 2006) made the BFI selection, as the male leads were played by familiar faces in a story that sees Bruno (Louis Garrel) decide that he will dump the perpetually tardy Rosette (Vahina Giocante) if she keeps him and pal Pierre (Mathieu Amalric) waiting for more than 45 minutes.

Although clearly bearing the imprint of the nouvelle vague, these shorts also revealed the influence on Ozon of Hollywood B movies, European arthouse, and Japanese cinema, and he would carry this eclecticism into his feature career. When asked why he had made so many shorts, Ozon paraphrased Jean-Luc Godard in claiming that they enabled him 'to practice his scales'. They also gave him the latitude to take risks and this approach very much characterised Ozon's first features.

Shock and Kitsch

Released shortly before his death at the age of 35, Cyril Collard's AIDS drama, Les Nuits sauvage (aka Savage Nights, 1992), ushered in a wave of French films exploring the LGBTQIA+ experience. It's hugely disappointing that so few of these pivotal films are on disc in the UK, including three key works by André Téchiné, J'embrasse pas (aka I Don't Kiss, 1991), Les Roseaux sauvages (aka Wild Reeds,1994) and Les Voleurs (aka The Thieves, 1996). However, while Cinema Paradiso users will have more luck with Josiane Balasko's Gazon maudit (aka French Twist,1995), Alain Berliner's Ma vie en rose, and Claire Denis's Beau travail (both 1997), they will have to be patient over Gabriel Aghion's Pédale douce (aka Soft Pedal, 1996) and Benoît Jacquot's L'Ecole de la chair (aka The School of Flesh, 1998), even though both were widely acclaimed.

We can't even bring you François Ozon's feature bow, Sitcom (1997), which is a shame as it would come as a surprise to those used to his more urbane outings over the last two decades. There are echoes of both Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema (aka Theorem, 1968) and John Waters's Serial Mom (1994) in a story that sees a bourgeois family descend into interracial adultery, sadomasochism, incest, paedophilia, group sex, and bestiality after the father brings home a white laboratory rat in a cage.

Prompting some to hail Ozon as French cinema's first 'mainstream queer auteur', this scabrous satire delighted in defamiliarising viewers with recognisable generic tropes by repurposing them to show people behaving and interacting in unfamiliar and unconventional ways. Yet, while some critics compared Ozon to taboo-busting iconoclasts like Joe Orton and La Movida-era Pedro Almodóvar, others accused him of packing his picture with gratuitous juvenilia and reinforcing homophobic stereotypes by presenting homosexuality as a perversion.

The response to his sophomore effort, Les Amants criminels (aka Criminal Lovers, 1999) was equally mixed. The story opens with Alice (Natacha Régnier) persuading boyfriend Luc (Jérémie Renier) to murder her ex, Saïd (Salim Kechiouche). However, as they dispose of the body in the woods, the pair are abducted by an old man (Miki Manojloviæ), who locks them in the cellar with the intention of eating them. Borrowing from Charles Laughton's The Night of the Hunter (1955) to put a dark spin on the Hansel and Gretel narrative, Ozon was both feted and castigated for having created a gay fairytale with a New French Extremity aura. Other features linked to this 'movement' include Catherine Breillat's Romance (1999) and Anatomy of Hell (2004), Virginie Despentes and Coralie Trinh Thi's Baise-moi (2000), Claire Denis's Trouble Every Day (2001), and Bruno Dumont's Twentynine Palms (2003).

With some branding Ozon an 'enfant terrible', it seemed natural to progress to a 1966 play (Tropfen auf heiße Steine) written at the age of 19 by another angry young cinephile, Rainer Werner Fassbinder (who also has his own Instant Expert's Guide ). Set in 1970s West Germany, the action of Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes (aka Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 2000) centres on the burgeoning romance between 50 year-old businessman, Léopold (Bernard Giraudeau), and Franz (Malik Zidi), a student who is 30 years his junior. However, things take a turn when they are joined by Franz's ex-fiancée, Anna (Ludivine Sagnier), and Léopold's old flame, Véra (Anna Levine), who is a trans woman.

'My goal,' Ozon explained, 'is to dig deep into a story to the place where it hurts, as Fassbinder did in his films...not to stay with the nice superficial side of things.' Many compared the picture to The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972), which Ozon would rework as Peter von Kant in 2022, a version that is not currently available on disc. It won the Teddy Award at the 50th Berlin Film Festival and introduced a new level of kitsch novelty into Ozon's cinema when the ménage à quatre is interrupted by a vaudeville song-and-dance routine to Tony Holiday's pop hit, 'Tanz Ein Samba Mit Mir'.

A Sophisticated Triptych

Ozon emerged into the new century with a fresh perspective. As he explained in an interview, 'Fassbinder said that what he liked about Douglas Sirk's work was the fact he had the feeling to see for the first time women thinking on the screen. Usually women just have to look pretty in movies and I like to try to show the psyche or the interior of a woman.' This shift prompted three of the finest films in Ozon's career and made him an arthouse darling. As French critic Frédéric Bonnard put it in a Film Comment article, he went from being 'an over-eager young show-off' to 'a definite asset to French cinema, a bankable auteur'.

Co-written with Emmanuèle Bernheim, Sous le sable (aka Under the Sand, 2000) begins with Marie (Charlotte Rampling) and Jean Drillon (Bruno Cremer) on holiday. However, the English professor has to return to Paris alone when her husband disappears during a swim and she refuses to accept his death. Haunted by visitations, she spurns a lover and endures the cruel speculations of her mother-in-law, while remaining in denial even after being confronted with irrefutable evidence.

Having previously teamed on Patrice Chéreau's La Chair de l'orchidée (aka Flesh of the Orchid, 1975), Rampling and Cremer have an easy rapport that makes her all-consuming grief so persuasive and poignant. Ozon borrowed elements from Douglas Sirk's All That Heaven Allows (1955) in using colour and the landscape to reflect Marie's emotions. Rampling is outstanding and earned a César nomination for Best Actress. Ozon was also cited and went on to receive a Best Director nod at the European Film Awards. Moreover, he was praised by Ingmar Bergman, who revealed that he had watched the film several times.

Sharing the writing duties with Marina de Van, Ozon scored an even bigger hit with 8 femmes (aka 8 Women, 2002), which turned Robert Thomas's 1958 stage whodunit into a super-chic musical. Initially, Ozon considered remaking George Cukor's The Women (1939) - which Diane English would succeed in doing in 2008 - but he recognised that the play offered him more scope to explore his themes while paying homage to Sirk, Vincente Minnelli, and Alfred Hitchcock.

With an all-star ensemble dressed in 1950s fashions designed by Ozon regular, Pascaline Chavanne, the action takes place in a remote country chateau at Christmas and considers the suspects when the man of the house is found stabbed in his study. Wife Gaby (Catherine Deneuve) is consoled by daughters Suzon (Virginie Ledoyen) and Catherine (Ludivine Sagnier). But sister Augustine (Isabelle Huppert) and their mother (Danielle Darrieux) are less devastated, much to the chagrin of the victim's sister, Pierette (Fanny Ardant), who has been having an affair with Madame Chanel (Firmine Richard), the cook who shares the servants' quarters with the new maid, Louise (Emmanuelle Béart), who had found the body.

Using song lyrics to reveal inner thoughts and comment upon social attitudes, Ozon tinkers with the conventions of the country house murder, while also playing cinematic games. He cites François Truffaut's La Femme d'à côté (aka The Woman Next Door, 1981) during Deneuve and Ardant's exchanges (as both were close to the director), with the former getting to repeat a line she had uttered in both La Sirène du Mississippi (aka Mississippi Mermaid, 1969) and Le Dernier métro (aka The Last Métro, 1980). Ozon also alludes to Deneuve's previous teamings with Darrieux in Jacques Demy's Les Demoiselles de Rochefort (aka The Young Girls of Rochefort, 1967) and André Téchiné's Le Lieu du crime (aka The Scene of the Crime, 1986). Darrieux's past appearances in the Henri Decoin murder mysteries, La Vérité sur Bébé Donge (aka The Truth About Bébé Donge, 1952) and L'Affaire des poisons (aka The Case of Poisons, 1955), also get a mention. But so few French films from this period are available on disc, as Cinema Paradiso members will discovered by reading A Brief History of the Tradition of Quality.

Along with winning the Silver Bear at Berlin for Outstanding Artistic Contribution, 8 Women also drew 12 César nominations. It didn't convert any, but Ozon did land the Lumière Award for Best Director. He also scored his biggest box-office success, although he would surpass it with Swimming Pool (2003), an erotic thriller that reunited Ozon with Emmanuèle Bernheim and saw him work in English for the first time.

Suffering from writer's block, London-based crime novelist Sarah Morton (Charlotte Rampling) accepts the offer of publisher John Bosload (Charles Dance) to use his French villa to seek inspiration. However, it comes from an unlikely source, as Sarah finds herself sharing the property with Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), who claims to be John's illegitimate daughter and whose busy sex life comes to intrigue her older rival for the affections of the handsome Franck (Jean-Marie Lamour).

Ever the cinéaste, Ozon flecks the action with filmic references, notably to Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les Diaboliques (1955) and Jacques Deray's La Piscine (1969). But he also admitted that this insight into the creative process was a deeply personal film, as he identified strongly with Sarah. Indeed, he even quoted from Water Drops on Burning Rocks, Under the Sand, and 8 Women in charting the shifting relationship. Despite missing out on the Palme d'or, the film's critical and commercial success took Ozon to a new level, which he would find hard to sustain in his constant quest for the next new thing.

Mixed Fortunes

Having raised his profile, Ozon retreated from the offers pouring in from Hollywood to make 5x2 (2004), which reviews five key moments in the relationship between Marion (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and Gilles (Stéphane Freiss). As the chronology is reversed, comparisons were inevitably made with Christopher Nolan's Memento (2000) and Gaspar Noé's Irréversible (2002). However, Ozon took his cues from both Jane Campion's teleplay, 2 Friends (1996), and Ingmar Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage (1974). The leads are superb, as they deliver the often woundingly frank dialogue. But the four silences prove just as effective and remind one of the 'pillow shots' that Yasujuro Ozu used to give viewers time to reflect on the action they had just seen.

Rather than collaborating with Emmanuèle Bernheim again, Ozon went solo on the screenplay for Le Temps qui reste (aka Time to Leave, 2005). The focus falls on Romain (Melvil Poupaud), a thriving photographer, who is told that he only has months to live after blacking out during a shoot. Unable to cope with the diagnosis, he dumps boyfriend Sasha (Christian Sengwald) and hides the truth from his parents (Daniel Duval and Marie Rivière) and sister (Louise-Anne Hippeau). However, he is able to confide in his ageing grandmother (Jeanne Moreau) and a waitress (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who takes an interest in him.

Despite enabling the audience to empathise with a sometimes resistible character, this was deemed a disappointment by Ozon's admirers. Yet, its insights into intimacy, isolation, and family bonds are profound and moving in a way that makes this a fine companion piece to Under the Sand.

When asked why he had turned down Hollywood, Ozon had replied, 'François Truffaut said the Americans respect you when you stay in your country, but when you arrive in America it's finished. They'll destroy you.' He also felt there was little point in putting himself at creative risk by relocating, 'To do what?,' he queried in one interview. 'To become like the German directors who go to Hollywood now? They aren't German anymore. I'm still French. I liked Hollywood in the '40s and '50s, but now I'm not sure I would find my place and I'm not sure if I would be able to work under their conditions. In France you are very free as a director, you have the final cut. In America, the important person is not the director, but the producer. In France even if you are not established, a young director is respected.'

Despite such reasoning, Ozon still hankered after making a film in English and did so with Angel (2007). Adapted from a novel by Elizabeth Taylor, the drama contained scenes shot at Tyntesfield House in Somerset, as Ozon went back to Edwardian times to show how 17 year-old Angelica Deverell (Romola Garai) purchases a stately home called 'Paradise' after one of the romantic stories she had written in the flat above her mother's grocery shop becomes an unexpected bestseller. However, moving into high society proves more difficult than Angel had anticipated, even after marrying handsome artist, Esmé Howe-Nevinson (Michael Fassbender).

Ozon proclaimed Garai to be his muse while promoting a film that also boasted Sam Neill and Charlotte Rampling as Angel's publisher and his wife. But the lavish production values and Garai's bold bid to channel the spirits of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford failed to find favour with the critics, with some suggesting that Ozon had failed where Todd Haynes had succeeded in Far From Heaven (2002) in pastichng Douglas Sirk. 'Not everyone is used to this grand style,' he offered in mitigation, 'The people who enjoy it are very old or very gay, and maybe very young. Little girls love the film.'

Another British source, Rose Tremain's short story, 'Moth', provided the inspiration as Ozon went to opposite extremes in striving to emulate the social realism of Ken Loach and Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne in Ricky (2009), which failed to secure a release in British cinemas. Living in a rundown neighbourhood in Seine-et-Marne, Katie (Alexandra Lamy), falls for Spanish factory co-worker, Paco (Sergi López). When she gives birth to a cherubic son, however, she is dismayed to discover that he is sprouting wings. Despite this development, most critics agreed that the film didn't take flight, with the blend of fantasy, farce, and freakshow prompting some to suggest that Ozon was losing his touch by trying to match British counterpart Michael Winterbottom is being both prolific and eclectic.

Naturally, Cinema Paradiso believes that every film needs to be seen before judgement can be passed and one of the benefits of our unrivalled service is that members can catch up with films that the critics dismissed and come to their own conclusions. The reviews for Le Refuge (aka Hideaway, 2009) were polite, but lukewarm. But how would you respond to the story of a heroin addict (Isabelle Carré) who discovers she's pregnant after her boyfriend (Melvil Poupaud) dies of an overdose? When she retreats to a borrowed house by the sea, however, Mousse finds herself unexpectedly hosting her lover's gay musician brother, Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy), who is passing through en route to Spain.

Carré was actually pregnant during the shoot, which was hastily organised. Yet an air of calmness cocoons this typically acute reflection on the human predicament, even though its matter-of-fact denouement divided opinion.

Bouncing Back

François Truffaut always tried to ensure that a new film had little in common with its predecessor. François Ozon seems to think the same way. As he told the New York Times, 'I would have been a very good director for the Hollywood of the '30s or the '40s, when it was possible to make a Western, a musical and a comedy in the same year.' When asked about his auteur status, he revealed, 'I think I am a cinephile-director, so I like many different movies: I can like horror, melodrama, Japanese film...it's not a problem for me to like very different movies because that is what I like in cinema - it's the richness. So when I make my films I don't think, "Oh, I want to make this genre," or anything. But what I like in cinema is variety and to me it's different films. I don't want to be just in one way, I like to try different ways. So sometimes it's very disturbing for the audiences and critics because they can't say: it's a comedy, it's a drama...it's difficult to define.'

No one had about problems getting to grips with Potiche (2010), however, which was adapted from a 1980 boulevard play by Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy, although Ozon seizes upon the 1970s factory setting to remind everyone that his star, Catherine Deneuve, also headlined Jacques Demy's Les Parapluies de Cherbourg (aka The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, 1964). The brolly business bequeathed by Suzanne Pujol's father is now being run with dehumanising rigidity by her husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), who is having an affair with his secretary, Nadège (Karin Viard). When the workers go on strike, Suzanne ignores the views of her right-wing daughter, Joëlle (Judith Godrèche), and left-leaning son, Laurent (Jérémie Rénier), to form an alliance with the Communist mayor, Maurice Babin (Gérard Depardieu), who just happens to be her old flame.

Imagine someone crossing Julien Duvivier's adaptation of Giovanni Guareschi's The Little World of Don Camillo (1952) with Gerald Thomas's Carry On At Your Convenience (1971) and you get an idea of this bawdily broad political satire. As in the Boulting strike classic, I'm All Right Jack (1959), the pitch and the performances are spot on and it deserved to pick up more than a BAFTA nomination for Best Foreign Film and a César nod for Best Adapted Screenplay. Nevertheless, with its notable contributions by production designer Katia Wyszkop and composer Philippe Rombi, this camp masterclass restored Ozon to critical favour and did decent business in the process.

Recalling his earlier reworkings of Pasolini's Teorema, Ozon based Dans la maison (aka In the House, 2012) on Spaniard Juan Mayorga's play, The Boy in the Last Row. However, the works of Woody Allen and Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954) are also among the inspirations, as teacher Germain Germain (Fabrice Luchini) becomes so intrigued by the stories written by malevolent 16 year-old student, Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), that he turns a blind eye when he seduces a classmate's mother (Emmanuelle Seigner) and his own wife (Kristin Scott Thomas).

Blurring the line between fact and fiction, Ozon covers some of the same ground explored by Patrice Leconte's Intimate Strangers (2004), in which Luchini plays a lawyer who allows Sandrine Bonnaire to believe he's a psychiatrist because he's fascinated by her confidences. Opting for satire rather than suspense, Ozon's dissection of bourgeois mores confirmed him as the master of genre manipulation, as it earned César nominations for Best Film, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, while also winning the prestigious Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival.

The Same Old Different

Precocious youth has been a recurring theme of Ozon's cinema and he took it in a provocative new direction in Jeune et jolie (aka Young and Beautiful, 2013). Having lost her virginity during a meaningless holiday tryst, teenager Isabelle (Marine Vacht) returns to Paris and uses her tekkie smarts to set herself up as an online prostitute named Léa, who meets her clients in swanky hotels. She becomes fond of sixtysomething regular, Georges (Johan Leysen), but things unravel following a traumatic night and mother Sylvie (Géraldine Pailhas) discovers her daughter's secret.

Ozon got himself in hot water at Cannes while promoting this homage to Luis Buñuel's Belle de jour (1967). He told The Hollywood Reporter that it was 'a fantasy of many women to do prostitution' and made things worse by joking to Indiewire about the accusations of misogyny, 'I was the new Lars von Trier, I should have spoken about Nazis too. Nazis and prostitution would have been bigger.' However, critics accepted that this was primarily a treatise on the fearlessness of millennials. 'For Deneuve in Belle de jour,' he explained, 'becoming a prostitute was a big deal. Today, you go online, you upload your photo, and voilà!'

He continued to test the tolerance of older generations with Une nouvelle amie (aka The New Girlfriend, 2014), which was loosely adapted from a short story by Ruth Rendell. Exploring the shifting boundaries between masculinity and femininity, the story centres on Claire (Anaïs Demoustier), who is devastated when best friend Laura (Isild Le Besco) dies. In seeking to help the widowed David (Romain Duris) look after his infant daughter, however, Claire chances upon him wearing his wife's dress and soon finds herself conspiring with David to allow Virginia to find her place in the world.

In addition to the obvious nod towards Ozon's short, A Summer Dress, this teasing, but restrained dramedy also carries echoes of the ways in which Claude Chabrol, Brian De Palma. and Pedro Almodóvar bait the bourgeoisie. With Pascaline Chavanne's costumes again proving pivotal, Ozon is able to examine the relationships that Claire forges with David and Virginia while convincing herself that she's not cheating on her dependably dull husband, Gilles (Raphaël Personnaz), who rather recalls Fred (Cyril Raymond) in David Lean's Brief Encounter (1945).

As we have seen, Ozon has alternated throughout his career between commercial and auteur cinema by using identifiable stylistic traits and iconoclastic personal pre-occupations to challenge generic convention. In this way, he bears comparison to Graham Greene, who divided his publications into 'novels' and 'entertainments', as Ozon has always given himself the freedom to be effusive in one film and sombre in the next. The point is eloquently made by Frantz (2016), a monochrome drama set in post-Great War Germany that draws on L'Homme que j'ai tué (aka The Man I Killed), the 1930 play by Maurice Rostand that Ernst Lubitsch adapted for the screen as Broken Lullaby (1931). Rent them together from Cinema Paradiso, as they make an intriguing double bill.

Feeling guilty about shooting a German soldier in the trenches, French musician Adrien (Pierre Niney) travels to the small town of Quedlinburg to lay flowers on his grave. He lies to fiancée Anna (Paula Beer) and Frantz's parents (Ernst Stötzner and Marie Gruber) that they had been student friends before the conflict. But the closer he comes to his victim's family, the more afraid Adrien becomes that the truth will slip out.

Nominated for 11 Césars, including Best Film, Director, and Adapted Screenplay, this delicately handled drama revealed a new side to Ozon's talent, although he couldn't resist the temptation to quote from Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo (1959) as Anna emerges from her state of mourning, most notably in a scene set in an art gallery in which Pascal Marti's dignified black-and-white visuals erupt into colour.

Opening on a match shot that's designed to stupefy, there's little sign of such sensitivity in L'Amant double (aka Double Lover, 2017), which owes its origins to Lives of the Twins, a psychological thriller that Joyce Carol Oates wrote under the nom de plume, Rosamond Smith. Some may detect tremors from Alfred Hitchcock's Spellbound (1945), Brian De Palma's Sisters (1973), David Cronenberg's Dead Ringers (1988), and Paul Verhoeven's Basic Instinct (1992) in the way in which twin psychiatrists, Paul and Louis (both Jérémie Renier), treat troubled museum attendant, Chloé (Marine Vacth). But this often feels like Ozon revisiting some of the themes and tropes that made his earliest features so notorious.

By contrast, in Grâce à Dieu (aka By the Grace of God (2019), he placed himself at the disposal of the traumatised men with whose stories he had been entrusted. Initially, Ozon had thought that the testimonies given against an abusive priest in the Lyon diocese would be better suited to the stage. He then considered making a documentary. But the families wanted him to produce something along the lines of Tom McCarthy's Oscar-winning Spotlight (2015) and Ozon cast Melvil Poupaud, Denis Ménochet, and Swann Arlaud as Alexandre, François, and Emmanuel, whose accusations against Fr Bernard Preynat (Bernard Verley) take the investigation in a new direction.

'My initial idea was to make a film about male fragility,' Ozon revealed in an interview. 'I've brought many strong female characters to the screen. This time, I wanted to turn my attention to men who are visibly suffering and feeling emotional, things we usually associate with the female gender.' He said elsewhere: 'I directed each part of the film according to the personality of the main character featured in it. To illustrate Alexandre's "crusade", my direction is understated and conventional, playing a lot on backlighting and chiaroscuro. When we get to François, the rhythm is choppier. It feels a bit more like an action film as he battles to bring the scandal to light and give voice to the victims. The tone then becomes more melodramatic with the arrival of Emmanuel, who is fighting for survival in a legal case that is over his head.'

Working from a news story and with a large ensemble for the first time, Ozon stuck closely to the recorded testimonies, while taking dramatic liberties with the storylines involving those close to the victims. While he changed their family names, however, Preynat and Cardinal Philippe Barbarin (François Marthouret) were actual clerics. Indeed, the former attempted to prevent the film from being shown before he was defrocked and jailed for five years in 2020.

Frustratingly, Ozon's most recent outings are not currently available to rent from Cinema Paradiso. It took him nearly four decades to adapt Aidan Chamber's Young Adult novel, Dance on My Grave, having started to write a screenplay with a friend in the mid-1980s. As Robert Smith of The Cure wouldn't let him use the 1985 song 'In Between Days' if he insisted on setting the action in 1984, Ozon was forced to change the title of Été 85 (aka

Summer of 85, 2002). Félix Lefebvre and Benjamin Voisin sizzle with juvenile brio, while Valeria Bruni Tedeschi is typically excellent as the latter's shopkeeper mother.

Charlotte Rampling made an equally effective cameo in Tout s'est bien passé (aka Everything Went Fine, 2021), which Ozon adapted from a memoir by longtime scripting collaborator, Emmanuèle Bernheim, who had died in 2017 at the age of 61. Examining French laws relating to assisted dying, the poignant drama follows sisters Emmanuèle (Sophie Marceau) and Pascale (Géraldine Pailhas) after their 85 year-old father, André (André Dussollier), suffers a stroke and asks them to smuggle him across the Swiss border so he can die with dignity. 'Some mean critics in France said I added the story of the father having a gay lover,' Ozon told an interviewer. 'But I didn't invent it! That was real!'

We have already mentioned Peter Von Kant (2022), which stars Denis Ménochet as the eponymous film-maker who has a mid-life crisis after actress friend Sidonie (Isabelle Adjani) introduces him to Amir (Khalil Gharbia), a handsome North African actor who takes advantage of the older man's obsession. Let's hope this finds its way to disc in the near future, along with Mon crime (aka The Crime Is Mine, 2023), which is currently on general release, and Quand vient l'automne (aka When Fall Is Coming, 2024), which has recently graced the London Film Festival.

The former is based on a 1934 play by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil, which has twice been adapted in Hollywood, as Wesley Ruggles's True Confession (1937) and John Berry's Cross My Heart (1946). In Ozon's typically mischievous, #MeToo-slanted period piece, washed-up silent diva Odette Chaumette (Isabelle Huppert) takes exception when struggling actress Madeleine Verdier (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) and her lawyer flatmate, Pauline Mauléon (Rebecca Marder), seek to gain publicity when a casting-couch producer is murdered in 1930s Paris.

Once again changing tack with each assignment, Ozon views love from a unique perspective in When Fall Is Coming, as he explores the friendship in a picturesque Burgundian village between Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) and Michelle (Hélène Vincent), who respectively dote on their jailbird son, Vincent (Pierre Lotin), and their adorable grandson, Lucas (Garlan Erlos), whose holiday stay is cut short when Michelle accidentally gives his mother, Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier), a plate of poisonous mushrooms.

Asked once about his prolific work rate, Ozon replied: 'I would be able to shoot even more if I didn't have the promotion and all these kinds of things to do. I would do it like Fassbinder - seven films a year - if I could. Making films is a pleasure for me. Many of my friends are directors and it's very heavy work for them, they suffer a lot. I don't suffer. Of course, there are some difficult moments, but most of the time it's a pleasure to make movies. Jeu d'enfant - I don't know how to say that. It's very childish to make a film, so I take a lot of pleasure in it.' And long may he continue to do so.