Ricky

François Ozon is perhaps best known for his films Swimming Pool (2003) and 8 Women (2002). Perhaps ‘best known’ because they have had the widest release, in Australia at least, and have been most critically acclaimed. They are the most mainstream, glossy incarnations from Ozon. Having said that, they are still quintessentially Ozon-ian, in the way he disrupts cinematic tradition and expectation. In 8 Women, Ozon offers a spectacle of France’s greatest screen actresses (Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen, Danielle Darrieux, Ludivine Sagnier, Firmine Richard). Aesthetically, he pays homage to the cinema of 1950s Hollywood, while cleverly shifting through a myriad of genres: musical, comedy, melodrama, mystery, and whodunit. While this film is light and funny, it is also intelligent and offers a feast for cinephiles that will be titillated by his intertextual references.

These two ‘successes’, however, are a departure from the more complex, often darker and stranger films that have not been met with such overwhelming praise and popularity. Ozon has failed to be anthologized in numerous books on French Cinema in recent years. Adam Bingham, an international film scholar, suggests this is much to do with the difficulty of securing a stable oeuvre for Ozon’s work. He writes:

‘the central issue in this neglect concerns French cinema's (and French critical magazines like Cahiers du Cinema and Positif's) perpetual and often over-riding placement of its directors in schools, movements and other such groupings to help define its own sense of national cinema.

Despite the difficulty of placing Ozon within a particular school or movement, he does return to particular preoccupations, that of sex and sexual ambiguity, mystery and murder. And while these are recurrent themes, they work as a context in which Ozon burrows deeper to explore complex relationships, desires, passions, societal expectations and gendered roles.

Thematically, Ozon’s latest Australian release, Ricky (2009), now playing at ACMI, departs slightly from these topics, while he still works with distabalising and challenging traditional images and genres.

The film opens to a tight shot of a woman’s face, speaking to (an off-camera) social worker. We watch her slowly unravel and confide about her losing control of her family situation: her husband has left her, she cannot pay the rent, or cope with her screaming baby. From here, we move back a few months, where we meet Katie and her seven-year-old daughter Lisa. We move slowly and beautifully through their symbiotic relationship, their morning rituals in getting up and getting ready for work and school. The roles of the ‘mother’ and the ‘daughter’ are often complicated with role reversal between the child and adult.

Ozon plays a fine balance between realism and elegantly stylised colour, texture and movement. The housing estate where Katie and Lisa live, the claustrophobic feeling of their apartment, the factory in which Katie works, are seen with an unromantic beauty.

Very quickly, a man enters this picture and disturbs the dynamic between the mother and child. The forming of a new family begins. There are many ellipses in the development of the relationship and new circumstances, but what we do see is treated with slow and intimate detail. The rhythm and pacing is slow and subtle, even though narrative and internal time progresses with speed.

In the scheme of the film’s narrative, the opening scene with Katie and the social worker has no anchor. It is strategically placed to open up a number of possibilities, and engage the viewer to actively participate in the small mysteries of the film. This has the effect that once we reach the true ‘climax’ of the story, although we have been engaged in a kind of fine tension in the relationship drama of the characters, the actual outcome of this tension is a huge shock. This ‘climax’ carries with it a fantastical element, and has the potential to propel the film into an entirely unexpected dimension, this, however, does not happen. Ozon handles the fantastical elements in much the same fashion as the ‘realism’ of the beginning. The fantastical is always tethered to the real. The attention to complex relationship and familial binds continues to be the centre of Ozon’s preoccupations. The balance between the real and the stylised encompasses this fantastical element without jarring and without careening into science fiction. Ozon’s humor and lighter side are intact here, with moments of ‘Hollywood’ and ‘Disney’ making appearances in the music score and some of the more fantastical sequences.

Ricky falls into the category of a more classical, and more interesting, Ozon film, where both the narrative focus and his deft handling of genre and style, work to shake existing treatments of these ideas. His next feature, The Refuge, seems to be another such offering. It premiered in Europe earlier this year, however, it has no Australian distributor as yet.

RICKY
François Ozon
ACMI
February 26 – March 10, 2010