Where to begin with François Ozon

You can never be sure what to expect from a François Ozon film. Since the turn of the millennium, the French auteur has released a film nearly every year, and his prodigious filmography defies easy categorisation, turning between gushing melodramas, heady romances, erotic thrillers, played-straight procedurals and other genres besides.

However, Ozon is consistent in his fascination with the messy nuances of interpersonal connection. His oeuvre playfully meddles with the traditional family unit, incorporating violence, seductive imagery and queer intimacy as he illuminates the isolating and unconventional sides of his characters.

Born in Paris in 1967, Ozon did a masters in cinema at the Sorbonne, and in 1990 was selected to attend La Fémis, the French national film school. Making his feature debut in 1998, he became one of the poster boys for early 21st-century French cinema, combining slick visuals with alluring stars, notably the actresses – such as Charlotte Rampling and Catherine Deneuve – who are the beating hearts of his films. 

His craft was inspired by the subversive charm of John Waters, the erotic surrealism of Luis Buñuel and the heightened social criticism of Rainer Werner Fassbinder – whose film The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant (1972) Ozon would adapt for his gender-swapped Peter von Kant (2022), his second Fassbinder project after his play adaptation Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000). 

As Ozon’s career has progressed, he has maintained his arthouse association with the bodily intimacy and transgression linked with the ‘cinéma du corps’ (cinema of the body) movement, while deepening his explorations of the human psyche.

8 Women (2002), Ozon’s fifth feature, is a prime introduction to the director’s affinity for spectacle and heightened theatricality. The film also showcased Ozon’s commercial viability, getting the director international acclaim and name recognition well beyond France. 

Based on Robert Thomas’s 1958 play Huit femmes, the campy musical comedy mystery is like a Clue reboot, but one that’s less concerned with the whodunnit murder and more interested in musical numbers from a cast featuring eight of France’s most celebrated actresses: Fanny Ardant, Emmanuelle Béart, Danielle Darrieux, Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Virginie Ledoyen, Firmine Richard and Ludivine Sagnier.

One by one, these eccentric women take centre stage to share their alibis after the death of the family patriarch, which Ozon interrupts with memorable scenes of Huppert’s piano medley, which brings everyone to tears, and a fight that results in Ardant and Deneuve’s characters locking lips. The film deals in Ozonian themes of murder, adultery and queerness, but with less intense, explicit handling than usual.

Visually, 8 Women’s playfully over-the-top, melodramatic flare references a Technicolor cinematic past: the bright, kitsch costumes are an homage to Jacques Demy’s bittersweet musical The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964), while the vibrant, festive vignettes provide a nod to Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St. Louis (1944). This musicality leads to 8 Women’s finale, where the eight women join hands in a line as if they’re taking a curtain call bow.

Ozon followed 8 Women with the sun-soaked erotic thriller Swimming Pool (2003) in which British crime novelist Sarah’s (Rampling) peaceful holiday at her publisher’s villa is interrupted by Julie (Sagnier), a lusty young woman claiming to be the publisher’s daughter. Ozon is in his element balancing eroticism, paranoia and twisted secrets as Sarah grows obsessed with watching Julie skinny dipping, sunbathing topless and hooking up with strangers from town. 

Sarah’s gaze is replicated with Ozon’s voyeuristic camera, smoothly gliding over sunlit skin, though the cinematography becomes more restless when the film turns towards violence. Hitchcockian tension bristles as unsettling ambiguities and the dark presence of death once again loom over the director’s female characters.

In the years that followed, Ozon continued to burrow into the human condition to explore sexuality with 5x2 (2004), the slow-burn story of a disintegrating marriage told in reverse, and Young and Beautiful (2013), a Buñuel-inspired narrative where a teenage girl’s holiday becomes a fervent exploration of sexuality. 

Ozon also brought queerness to the fore: though Time to Leave (2005) offered the director a chance to explore the existentialism of a terminally ill man trying to make peace, it was his more recent Summer of 85 (2020) that struck a lingering chord. This sensual romance set in Normandy in 1985 has 1980s American coming-of-age drama stylings as it balances the giddy, hormonal experience of first love with the insurmountable devastation of an untimely death. The doomed sense of inevitability is deeply unnerving, with Ozon’s preoccupation with death underscoring even the sunniest shots.

Ozon’s most recent films return to the director’s murder-mystery fascination. He reunited with Huppert for the riotous The Crime Is Mine (2023), where a young actor achieves stardom after being acquitted of murder. A 1930s period piece laced with commentary on stardom, sapphic infatuation and murder, it’s an easily digestible comedic picture. 

While 8 Women and The Crime Is Mine see a search for the suspect, his new film When Autumn Falls sees a woman turn inwards as she questions whether serving her daughter poisonous mushrooms was genuinely accidental. Ozon trades a provocative reveal for a quietly poignant unravelling that fascinates and alarms in equal measure.

Although Sitcom (1998) was Ozon’s feature debut, its a surrealistic satire that doesn’t make for the most accessible entry to the French director’s career. The brilliantly absurd film explores how the degenerative destruction of an upper-class French family is triggered by their pet rat, the presence of which brings to the surface the family’s dark desires, including incest, murder and sadomasochism. The film’s rapid descent into perversion is so unruly that even the disciplined matriarch (Evelyne Dandry) can’t keep up with her family’s antics. 

The film’s erotic twists and transgressive turns are a continuation of Ozon’s early short oddities, including Victor (1993), Une robe d’été (1996) and X2000 (1998), which play like small experiments from a director crafting his classic style.

When Autumn Falls is in cinemas from 21 March.