Dir: François Ozon

Romain (Melvil Poupard) is a spoiled, arrogant, nasty gay fashion photographer whose entitled life is about to end.  He has cancer, and it has metastisized (or, as his French doctor says, ‘desséminé’, which sounds less pathological than it does merely bad manners).  In Francois Ozon’s new film Time to Leave (pardon my French, but doesn’t Le temps qui reste mean ‘the time we have left’?), Romain doesn’t take the news well.  He refuses chemotherapy and instead goes on a rampage of rudeness and cruelty, wrecking havoc on those around him who love him.  Though god only knows why they love him.  He’s bad-tempered, snotty, and if he weren’t good-looking and rich he’d have been forced to behave like a decent human being long ago.  He needlessly verbally annihilates his sister (Louise-Anne Hippeau) with a savageness that takes one’s breath away and then dumps his lover (Christian Sengewal) after making love to him (although it has all the love of rape).  He even cuts deep into his grandmother (the exquisite Jeanne Moreau, disturbingly sexy for a woman approaching 80), with a flip comment that they are very much alike: they’re both going to die soon. And it’s not just loved ones who are victims of his cruelty; he also attacks the kindly waitress in a roadside café (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) who only wants his sperm.  It’s sadism as sport

So why is Romain such a malicious bitch?  Is he being cruel to be kind, ending relationships now so he doesn’t bring those he loves into his spiral of grief and the destruction of his disease?  We don’t know.  In the photo shoot that opens the film, he’s an asshole.  When he gets the news that he has only three months to live, he’s still an asshole. Although he is irredeemable, he seems to come around in the end.  Is it the recurring memory of his young self (Ugo Soussan Trabelsi), who he sees at one point urinating into a font in a church?  (In this rememberance of things past, it’s not a Madeleine that sparks memories but a line of cocaine in his mother’s bathroom or a young man in a gay club as he gets fisted in a sling.  There seems to be a trend in recent French films, wherein the dark room of a gay club is a descent into hell.  I kept looking for a fire extinguisher, a new phobia of mine ever since Irreversible.)  It’s not clear why Romain finally comes around (he relents on the sperm issue).  Character motivation may be murky, unless one is familiar with the writings of Elizabeth Kübler Ross.  Then it all becomes clear.  It all becomes, in fact, a visual exercise in the five steps of getting bad news.  First there is denial, which doesn’t take long, the movie only being a brief 85 minutes long; then anger, which is the majority of the film; then bargaining, which was harder to spot, the French being so insouciant and all; depression (a few tears…selfish tears); and, finally, acceptance in the peaceful end on a beach as the sun sets and the picnickers pack up and go home.  This last might seem like bathetic and obvious symbolism (other examples might include a mawkish and lingering close-up on dying flowers or when he cuts off his hair in an odd biblical allusion and the camera holds on his crotch as his childish locks land on his underwear).  However, I believe this ending is actually in the grand tradition of Beach Movies (not the Annette Funicello variety) where the climactic epiphany takes place on a beach.  I think I’ll call them Films du Plage.  They include—among others—Bette Davis and Joan Crawford playing in the sand at the end of What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, or Marcello Mastroianni encountering lost innocence and a really ugly fish in La Dolce Vita, or Dirk Bogarde leaking hair dye in Death in Venice.

In recent years, Francois Ozon has become one of France’s most prodigious directors (as well as owning France’s All-Gay-All-The-Time television network, Pink TV), earning acclaim and international distribution for Swimming Pool, Under the Sand, and Water Drops on Burning Rocks.  But Time to Leave has none of the Grand Guignol of his 8 Women, none of the pitch dark fanstasia of Sitcom, none of the tragic inevitably of 5 x 2.  Well, perhaps some of the tragic inevitability of 5 x 2, but none of its cleverness.  We can’t grieve for Romain because we don’t care.  And I don’t think Boredom is one of Kübler Ross’s criteria.

Discuss this movie now at the Pure Movies Forum!