Directed by François Ozon. Starring Isabelle Carré, Louis-Ronan Choisy, Pierre Louis-Calixte, Melvil Poupaud 16 cert, IFI/Light House, Dublin, 88 min
A DECADE AGO, following successes such as Sitcomand Under the Sand, François Ozon became the latest film-maker to be identified as (Lord help him) The Future of French Cinema.
Maybe the pressure got to him. Maybe he just wanted a change of pace.
Anyway, in recent years – since 2004's 5x2, perhaps – the director has delivered a series of contained, only modestly ambitious films. Le Refugeis the smallest yet. It's not bad, but, an hour after the end credits roll, you'll have trouble remembering much about it.
The picture stars Isabelle Carré as Mousse, a heroin user who, after the death of her lover from an overdose, discovers she is carrying his baby. This being a French film, the dead man’s family turn out to be bourgeois snobs dominated by a matriarch with lacquered hair and a taste for knotted scarves. The harridan urges Mousse to have an abortion and the girl appears to agree.
Some months later, however, we find her living in a remote cottage some short distance from the sea. She is heavily pregnant. Her lover’s brother, a handsome gay man, comes to stay and they begin an uneasy, but ultimately solid, friendship. She argues with nutters on the beach. He launches an affair with the village handyman.
Carré does a good job of allowing traces of Mousse’s inner decency to leak through the drug-addled, ill-tempered, selfish exterior. She is taking methadone during the pregnancy – less dangerous than withdrawal symptoms, she claims – and, often photographed near mirrors, she never quite manages to shake off her chemical-fuelled ghost. Louis-Ronan Choisy has less to do as her new companion, but has a charming enough demeanour to enliven the flatly written badinage.
Le Refugeis decently acted, elegantly shot and equipped with
a neat, if only modestly plausible, final twist. It is, however, hard to escape the conclusion that if the characters were less good-looking and the scenery not quite so verdant, the film would have no reason to exist. It's not quite the Four Weddings and a Funeralof drug movies, but it's not far off.
Diverting, for all that.
