Robert Horton is a Scarecrow board member and a longtime film critic. This series of "critic's notes" is chance to highlight worthy films playing locally and connect them to the riches of Scarecrow's collection.
This week SIFF Film Center brings a new movie by the prolific François Ozon, When Autumn Is Coming, an offering that hits just the right note between sincerity and postmodern archness. I'm including a brief review of the film, originally published last fall for a festival report for the FIPRESCI website (I was on the international critics' jury at the Stockholm Film Festival). I'd been describing other morbid movies, which is why I refer to a "death quartet" at the beginning of the paragraph.
Also included is a 2002 review, originally published in The Herald, of Ozon's 8 Women, featuring a few quotes from the director himself, who came to Seattle to promote that one. I remember Ozon also talking about how daunting it was to be a film director coming up in the generation following the French New Wave. He also mentioned that 8 Women had changed the French public's perception of Isabelle Huppert—he said she's been something of a serious arthouse actress before that, but audiences were delighted to see how silly she could be.
When Autumn Is Coming
The final film in this death quartet is François Ozon’s When Autumn Is Coming (Quand vient l’automne), a delicate study almost perfectly balanced between Douglas Sirk-style melodrama, near-subliminal humor, and out-and-out camp. In short, Ozon is getting close to prime Almodovar territory. The setting is Burgundy, where a retiree (Hélène Vincent) enjoys the peace of the countryside after a turbulent life. We find out more about her past later in the film, but in the meantime, her devotion to her grandson is troubled by resentment from her daughter (Ludivine Sagnier). As the situation winds through its wild twists, Ozon never loses the placid tone, nor the feeling of age and its discontents. The performances by Vincent and Josiane Balasko (as her staunch friend and former business partner) are beautifully lived in, the two actresses embodying the autumn, or really early winter, of life. All that, plus the gloriously inventive Pierre Lottin in one of the year’s best supporting performances, as Balasko’s ne-er-do-well son, whose life has its own unexpected turns to come.
8 Women
Imagine an American movie that starred Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Barbra Streisand, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Sandra Bullock, and one or two other marquee actresses. Now imagine the budget and the logistics. And watch the movie evaporate.
In France, that same idea has come to fruition: 8 Women gathers the biggest female stars of French cinema into one giddy film.
The occasion for this summit meeting is a loose adaptation of a 40-year-old, Agatha Christie-style mystery play. Eight women come together in a snowed-in country house, and are shocked to learn that the man of the house has been murdered during the night.
Director Francois Ozon seems less interested in whodunit than in watching the women dance around each other as they accuse, suspect, and insinuate. Sometimes, in fact, they literally dance—and sing—for this is a movie that has little relation to realism (Ozon has called it “anti-naturalist” in style).
The cast is led by Catherine Deneuve—how could it not?—as the wife of the newly slain man. She has lots of secrets, but so does her mother, played by Danielle Darrieux (a legendary figure whose career began in the 1930s). Cast as Deneuve’s sister is Isabelle Huppert, another giant, whose daring performances lately have included The Piano Teacher and the upcoming Merci pour le chocolat. Huppert has transformed herself into a dowdy scold, unhappy unless she’s criticizing the other ladies in the house.
Playing Deneuve’s daughters are Virginie Ledoyen, the exciting young star of A Single Girl, and Ludivine Sagnier, an adorable sprite who appeared in Ozon’s Water Drops on Burning Rocks.
The dead man’s sister is played by Fanny Ardant, a big star since becoming the last discovery of the great Francois Truffaut 20 years ago. Ardant, playing a woman of somewhat shady character, gets to slink around in sultry spider-lady black and red dresses.
Finally, the two housekeepers are played by Emmanuelle Beart (who had a fling at Hollywood in Mission: Impossible) and Firmine Richard. Each actress is designed very specifically, color-coded in fact, turning the movie into eye candy.
The whole thing is a delicious stunt, not so much an actual melodrama as a postmodern goof on murder mysteries, Hollywood soap operas of the 1950s, and musicals. Ozon explained as much when he visited the area recently on a publicity trip.
A dark and intense 33-year-old, Ozon is part of a new generation of French filmmakers. His work includes the corrosive Sitcom and the quietly moving Under the Sand. For 8 Women, he explained that he wanted to make “a very artificial movie. I put it in the Fifties, because it’s not very realistic at all, and I love the theatrical aspects. It disturbs the audience. I love to disturb the audience!”
Ozon tried to get the saturated color in the film to resemble the Technicolor of the Fifties. He was also inspired by the films of Douglas Sirk, as well as the classic play/movie The Women, which also had an all-female cast. “We made up a dream cast,” said Ozon. “And all the French actresses I wanted, wanted to work with me.”
When I asked him whether part of his job on the set was to keep all those formidable actresses happy, Ozon replied, “I’m not here to make everybody happy. I’m here to make the film succeed.” Nevertheless, he said, “I think the actresses were happy to be on the film together. There was lots of”—he searched for the right word in English—“complicity? Like schoolgirls.”
Most films, Ozon observed, try to make you forget that the people in them are movie stars. “I wanted the audience to never forget these are stars,” he insisted. Given the movie’s deluxe style, no one will forget.
April 11, 2025
