François Ozon (review)

Over 30 directors now feature in this series, but since few of them are still fully active film makers, it is pleasing that an entire volume should be devoted to François Ozon, barely 40 when the book was completed. Andrew Asibong covers the entire clutch of admired shorts that gained Ozon recognition in the 1990s except 1997’s Scènes de lit and 1998’s X2000, and his eight features up to Angel (2006). His main thesis is that Ozon’s cinema is one of transgression and at least potential ethical transformation of its protagonists and spectators by means of extreme experience manifested in the films as bizarre, horrific, melodramatic and musical interludes, because it cannot be contained within realist narrative. Asibong first considers the thoroughly queer and postmodern panoply of sexual relations in the films up to Sitcom, whose final frame of a reconfigured family around the grave of its monster-father (killed by them after his metamorphosis into a rampaging giant rat) suggests that some form of community purified of the violent power relations of patriarchal society may be possible. This is only ever glimpsed in Ozon’s cinema, however (it is again at the end of 8 Femmes), never attained, and after 2000 Ozon’s films become increasingly beset by frustration and stagnation, as with the haunted, raging melancholy of Sous le sable’s Marie after her husband’s disappearance and the embittered early death from cancer of Romain in Le Temps qui reste. In his second chapter Asibong considers the cruelty, domination and suffering evident in Regarde la mer, Les Amants criminels, Gouttes d’eau sur pierres brûlantes and 8 Femmes, adeptly analysing how skilfully it is threaded through Ozon’s camerawork and indicating, interestingly, that the sadism occasionally extended to the film set. After a third chapter on the remaining post-2000 feature films that lapses a little too much into commentary, Asibong’s final chapter deals in detail with Ozon’s use of shlock horror, music and dance numbers and melodrama, arguing that these digressions into genre cinema serve to shock both the films’ protagonists and their spectators into new and perhaps revelatory ‘space[s] of sensory awareness’ (p. 117). The political ambivalence of melodrama argued for by film critics of the last 30 years exactly matches Asibong’s emphasis on the ethical ambivalence — and yet, power — of narrative and aesthetic excess. Asibong is at his strongest when quasi-psychoanalysing the undoubted narcissism behind Ozon’s cinema. His use of the work of Slavoj Žižek and other neo-Lacanians to argue for the persistence of a spectral patriarchal law amid chaotically plural sexual relations jars a little with other mentions of Deleuze and Guattari’s anti-Oedipal desiring machines, and it is disappointing, after an early footnote promising discussion of the degree of ‘autonomy and humanity’ granted to Ozon’s female protagonists (p. 30), that he is dismissive of Swimming Pool’s Sarah Morton and does not even mention the baby-theft central to the horror of Regarde la mer. Taken as a whole, however, this is a highly illuminating account of Ozon as a film maker of our neo-liberal age, written in a clear and lively style, that will be of interest and use to all undergraduates, postgraduates and researchers studying Ozon’s work.