Director – François Ozon – 2024 – France – Cert. 15 – 102m
*****
A grandmother’s cooking accidentally poisons her daughter, who survives… in the ensuing emotional turmoil, past truths are revealed, which have devastating effects… – out in UK cinemas on Friday, March 21st
Michelle (Hélène Vincent) lives alone in rural Burgundy. She goes to church. She goes out picking mushrooms with her old friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Bolasko), who attempts to stop her picking the poisonous ones. At home, Michelle double-checks the mushrooms against photos and blurb in her mushroom reference book. She cooks the mushrooms. She gets a phone call telling her her guests are on the way. She is surprised that the driver is using Laurant’s car.
Her daughter Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier) arrives in the car with grandson Lucas (Galan Erlos) in tow. He is looking forward to spending the Summer with his gran. Valérie, however, is constantly angry, blaming her mum for everything, occasionally making remarks about “what you did”. She is clearly upset by something in their past history, although it’s unclear as to exactly what. Although grandmother has given daughter her former Paris apartment, Valérie also seems keen that Michelle sign over the current house to her under a scheme that would exempt Valérie from paying tax on it. Michelle feels that she’s given her daughter so much, and yet her daughter is ungrateful.
The tension between grandmother and daughter is compounded after Michelle has served a satisfying meal. Valérie goes down with food poisoning, and the mushrooms – she was the only one who had them – are diagnosed as the cause by the hospital, which pumps her stomach. Discharged, the furious daughter takes her son back to Paris, believing that her mother isn’t fit to look after him. Lucas is clearly disappointed, as he was looking forward to spending time with his granny over the Summer holidays, while Michelle is deeply upset about the whole thing. Her daughter has added this latest incident to the seemingly endless tally of errors for which she blames her mum, and now won’t even return her phone calls. Michelle is understandably worried that she may never see her grandson again.
It’s standard procedure in cases of food poisoning for the cook to report to the police, so Michelle visits the station to cooperate, where she is interviewed by a kind and helpful police captain (Sophie Guillemin) who, as it happens, is a single mum-to-be due in three months time and who seems happy about the fact, a state of affairs not lost on Michelle.
When Marie-Claude’s son Vincent (Pierre Lottin) is released from prison, Michelle offers him cash-in-hand gardening work to help him get by while he looks for suitable employment. It turns out, though, that he wants to open and run a bar-tabac. It’s an expensive dream, yet perhaps because she wants to treat him as the descendant with whom she got on well, she bankrolls him. Marie-Claude is less complimentary, saying of Vincent that he means well, but it somehow always seems to go wrong. And subsequent events will point to the truth in Marie-Claude’s comments…
During the church service and mushroom-picking at the start, and indeed throughout much of the proceedings, one wonders exactly where the film is going. Nevertheless, as usual, master writer-director François Ozon knows exactly what he is about as his cast slowly work their way through the script (written with Ozon’s regular co-writer Philippe Piazzo) exploring characters as the narrative slowly but surely gives away things about their past lives. It’s a reminder that human beings can be complex creatures, and that first impressions can often belie the truth as to who people really are.
The old woman at the centre of the drama, and her long-standing best friend, have a past which has had and will have devastating effects on their nearest and dearest.
Part of what’s on offer here – and, apparently, one of the reasons Ozon made the film – is to watch two fantastic performances by actresses in their seventies and eighties. Nothing about this is worthy, in the Oscar-bait fashion; it’s much more the simple pleasure of watching two artists, steeped in the techniques of their craft, doing what they do and doing it incredibly well.
The rest of the cast are equally excellent. Sangier (who previously worked with Ozon back on Swimming Pool, 2003; 8 Women, 2002; Water Drops on Burning Rocks, 2000) is memorable as the harassed fortysomething daughter, while Lottin and Ozon’s mise-en-scène lends the friend’s son just the right amount of ambiguity in a late scene where it’s completely unclear whether an incident is an unfortunate accident or a premeditated criminal act. It’s left to the audience to decide whether the character is guilty of a crime, or whether what occurred is the straightforward accident many of the characters believe it to be.
Despite painting the protagonist as a churchgoer, the film never lays any religious sensibility on with a trowel. Yet it’s awash with ideas and themes of individuals’ choices in the past affecting them and those around them in the present, or characters accepting themselves and others (or, in some cases, not accepting them). It’s all very human, and ultimately has a great deal to say about what C.S. Lewis once described as “good death” and “bad death”.
It seems to ask far too much of a director that they always surprise you and pull off something very different with each film, even as they do so with consummate skill. Yet Ozon appears to do this effortlessly; time and again, he never disappoints, somehow managing to deliver every time.
When Autumn Falls is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, March 21st.
[Read my shorter review in Reform.]
Trailer: