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François Ozon was born in Paris to René and Anne-Marie Ozon on November 15, 1967. This book takes as one of its points of departure the idea that Ozon has consciously styled his œuvre thus far around a number of recurring tropes and themes, one of the most striking of which has been the emergence of adult sexualities and relations from out of the spectral carcasses of real or fantasised family members. Kinship, desire and violence thus structure the narratives of all the films under discussion, and can be seen to stamp Ozon's repertoire of images firmly with the mark of a self-styled auteur. The book discusses considers the majority of Ozon's short films together with his first feature Sitcom through the lens of desire, and demonstrates the extent to which Ozon's vision of human sexuality can be described as a fundamentally 'queer' and 'post-modern' one. It focuses on four of Ozon's simultaneously most accomplished and misunderstood films and approaches them via the perspective of the power relations they depict. They are Regarde la mer, Les Amants criminels, and 8 femmes. The book surveys a number of Ozon's films from the 2000s: Sous le sable, Swimming Pool, 5x2, and Le Temps qui reste. Sexual desire as represented by Ozon is almost always multidimensional and consistently astonishing in its capacity for boundless reinvention. His films frequently employ household servants among their cast of characters. Ozon uses tools borrowed from the toolbox of three genres: namely, horror, melodrama and musical.
By the age of thirty-seven François Ozon had seven features and a clutch of admired short films to his credit. But in France, his reputation has taken a very different course from the one it is now starting to get from Anglophone critics, whose familiarity with (or at least exposure to) the academic discourses of cultural studies, gender and queer theory attunes them to the centrality of sexuality to
With Angel, released in France in March 2007, François Ozon’s cinema has clearly shifted in a new direction, the exact nature and implications of which it is hard to pinpoint. As Ozon himself put it in an interview with French film journal Positif, ‘Il est vrai qu’avec ce film j’ai eu le sentiment d’être allé au bout de quelque chose. Je ne saurais pas trop dire quoi, mais j’ai senti qu
If one thing can be said with certainty about François Ozon’s career in filmmaking, it is this: it has moved with a lightning rapidity. The fact that between the ages of 30 and 40 – from 1997 to 2007 – he wrote and directed no fewer than nine feature films, all of which gained international distribution, widespread controversy (often accompanied by prizes and great acclaim), and not inconsiderable
Alongside filmmakers such as Catherine Breillat (Romance, 1999), Virginie Despentes (Baise-moi, 2000), Bruno Dumont (Twentynine Palms, 2003) Christophe Honoré (Ma mère, 2004) and Gaspar Noé (Irréversible, 2002), François Ozon has often been marketed and discussed – his surname serving the purpose particularly well – as one of a new breed of provocative French film directors emerging in the
François Ozon’s films frequently employ household servants among their cast of characters. In Ozon’s cinema, these domestic figures seem designed not merely to illustrate the bourgeois status of the other protagonists, but rather as crucial players in their own right, catalysts for the main action in the narrative, the location of the very possibility for the subversion of the social world contained
François Ozon’s cinema experiments wildly, as we have seen, with both the representation of forms of sexuality and the representation of forms of power. Neither type of experimentation on its own generates lasting or significant change in the worlds of his protagonists, however, since Ozon’s films gravitate towards the idea that a spectre beyond both sexuality and power haunts humans, that it is this
François Ozon’s early short film Action Vérité (1994) shows us four minutes in the lives of four young teenagers: two girls, Hélène (Farida Rahmatoullah) and Rose (Aylin Argun), and two boys, Rémy (Fabien Billet) and Paul (Adrien Pastor). The group are playing a game of ‘Truth or Dare’, all the interrogations or dares hinging, predictably enough, on issues of a sexual nature. Rose asks Paul if he
There have been vigorous debates about the condition and prospects of auteur cinema in France over the last decade, debates that seem mostly to have gone unreported in anglophone criticism of francophone cinema. But these have been paralleled by a revival of international debate about the status of the auteur: in their extended chapter on auteur cinema added to the second edition of Cook's