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Time to Leave (2005)

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From Time Out London

The latest from François Ozon is a typically lean and poised study of impending, untimely death that is as ghostly and unpredictably sketched as the coming of the Grim Reaper himself. Romain (Melvil Poupard) is a 31-year-old gay fashion photographer and not the most likeable man in all Paris; he snaps at his assistants, mistreats his family, snorts copious amounts of coke and is generally quite far up himself. Too bad, then, the more cold-hearted viewer might snort, when he collapses at a fashion shoot and is diagnosed with an advanced form of cancer that’s barely worth treating and given just a few months to live…

How to deal with this news? How (indeed if) to tell family and friends? How to consider one’s suddenly shortened life? Such questions are at the heart of Ozon’s film, but his treatment of them is elliptical, essential and defiantly in the first-person rather than fully realist or weepingly theatrical in the way that a less contemplative, more tear-jerking effort might attempt. Sure, Romain’s attitude to his family softens (there’s a quite special interlude when he spends a night with his grandmother, tenderly played by Jeanne Moreau and the only relation who knows of his illness), but our perspective of Romain’s death, like his life, remains resolutely selfish. There are some awkward notes. It’s difficult to swallow Romain’s late act of charity and sexual exploration: he agrees to impregnate a complete stranger (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi). And nostalgic visions of Romain as a child only just teeter on the right side of cloying. But Ozon succeeds best in presenting death’s approach as a sort of half-removed, ghostly existence – a point most movingly made by a beautifully conceived and choreographed final scene.

Author: Dave Calhoun

Time Out London Issue 1864: May 10-17 2006

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