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The Collected Shorts of Francois Ozon |
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By John Demetry
This sensibility could be caught in tantalizing glimpses in his first deviously erotic feature films: Sitcom, Criminal Lovers, and Water Drops on Burning Rocks. It remained subdued, muted, repressed like ants under a log in the sustained infested despair of his latest, Under the Sand. The Ozonesque reached its peak early with the duo-release of perhaps the best short films of the last decade, See the Sea and A Summer Dress. These two are, respectively, the scariest and the sexiest movies I've ever seen.
The short film, Bed Scenes, provides the perfect metaphor for the Ozonesque. The first in a series of seven scenes of couples in bed tells of a john hiring a prostitute with a special talent. She can sing the French national anthem while performing fellatio. The john lets his curiosity take control. The turn on is finding out her trade secret. Turning the light on, the john gets an eye-popping surprise. (So disturbing, I slept with the lights on the night I watched the DVD.) Ozon sneak attacks the sentiments and fears of the spectator mesmerized by his teasing manipulations.
Bed Scenes
There is something so elemental to adolescent experience about the game of truth or dare that it's surprising so few filmmakers have explored this ritual rite of adolescent anxiety. In the four-minute Truth or Dare, Ozon makes up for the century of cinematic neglect. He condenses every recognizable emotion attached to adolescent sexuality - culminating in its essential and resonating shock. Truth or Dare appears to be the most verite (realistic) of the shorts. The others feature deliberate compositions and severe graphics in the shots, heightened by an editing style attuned to color patterns in the sets and lighting. The handheld camera and eager editing in Truth or Dare seem to come from Ozon's desire to capture the layers of curiosity, lust, discomfort, and pleasure played out by four natural adolescent actors.
The largest-scale and probably the most personal for Ozon is Little Death. Ozon delves into a grave mediation on the photographic image: the truths and lies within the frame and the psychic relationship between photographer and subject, photograph and spectator. The lead character is a gay photographer who specializes in photographing his male models in the midst of orgasm. Estranged from his family, the photographer grudgingly gives in to his sister's urgings to visit his dying father in the hospital. The experience opens up scars, battle wounds in a war waged with photography. There's the picture of the photographer as a newborn, causing the father to proclaim his son too "ugly" to be his own. The photographer turns the photographs of himself during orgasm into a collage ("Am I ugly?" he asks his boyfriend). Seeking revenge, the photographer takes pictures of his father, naked and unconscious on his deathbed. In the dark room, he cuts the eyes out of a photograph of his father's face and wears it like a mask. Even the views outside the window of a moving train correspond with motion pictures ("I don't have a ticket. My father just died"). It's a penetrating depiction of how Queerness intensifies familial pain - a theme Ozon would do well to expand in his attempt to master the full-length feature form. The photographer's own narcissism blinds him to his sister's sadness. Hearing her story, his eyes widen. She offers him a gift - a collection of photographs that his father saved in a tin box. Photography can also heal.
The final bed scene of two young men is titled Virgins. "You're a virgin with boys, and I'm a virgin with girls," slyly observes hooty-hoo Jeremie Elkaim. "I would like to kiss you," he soon requests. A beautiful portrayal of seduction - the benevolent flip side to Truth or Dare - the spectator marvels at the possibilities of sex and of Ozon's unique cinema. The five-minute formal precision of X 2000 plays like Bed Scenes reduced to its aesthetic fundamentals. A man awakens in his apartment the night after a New Year's party - the first morning of 2000. He walks around nude, pondering the brothers (twins?) sleeping together in a sleeping bag on his floor and spying on a couple having sex in an apartment across from his window. The somewhat older woman who was in his bed takes a bath. Ants crawl up the man's foot. Everyone's naked. Ozon, behind the camera, wonders at the possibilities a new millennium offers him as a filmmaker. In the year 2001, Ozon is still a director to watch. I dare you to look away. |
The Little Death 
Truth Or Dare 
The unease running through the seven Bed Scenes (thanks to the opening
doozy) gets mixed with expansive sexual wonderment and surprise. A woman
prepares her speech for the man who publicly dissed her to a female friend.
Doing so, she discovers her fulfillment in an unexpected place. A hetero
couple lies head-to-toes on a bed and count backwards from 100 to. . .
guess! The way Ozon edits the countdown and the way the man bites the foot
of the woman as they approach. . . (guess!) is more fun the entire running
time of the much-lauded Amelie.
© 1997-2002 BEI