What should we make of François Ozon? Well, it’s generally nice to know he’s around. He certainly seems to know his stuff. With its actual rodent under the cocktail cabinet, the meta-Gallic movie Sitcom was clearly the work of one fully schooled in every French film ever made. Sure enough, the director’s not unrelated flair for dripping melodrama - a key informant in the haute camp of 8 Women and the libidinal charge of Swimming Pool – is almost always worth a gander.
Still, like Michael Winterbottom, Ozon’s prolific output and promiscuous style can be his undoing. Many titles, most recently 5X2, seem more like doodles than proper films. This is particularly true of Time To Leave (Le Temps Qui Reste), a gay dying young soap.
As is often the case with these things Romaine (Popaud), Parisian fashion photographer and ice cold fish, decides to keep his impending death a secret. Instead of doing something sensible like heading off to a ski resort to live it up, Romaine dumps his lover, fights with his sister and visits his grandmother (Moreau) to discuss death and sleep naked with her. Then other stuff happens. In no particular order - he visits a church, watches a breastfeeding mother, keeps flashing back to childhood and impregnates a childless couple.
By making his protagonist as selfish as possible, Ozon provides counterweight to the saccharine possibilities of the situation. But a tool is a tool is a tool. Ozon’s mediation of mortality occasionally attains poignancy, but this disagreeable centre of an already ill-defined narrative is the film’s undoing.
Even the lively, explicit sex scenes don’t make Time To Leave any less of a slog. M’eh.