Old lady Michelle (Hélène Vincent) in François Ozon’s When Fall Is Coming (Quand vient l’automne) is the most unsentimental movie character since Marianne Jean-Baptiste in Mike Leigh’s Hard Truths. Michelle faces her advanced age and inevitable mortality with the same calm she has when going about isolated household chores and carefully cooking at her country home. She’s excited only when her daughter Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier) visits from Paris with her grandson Lucas (Garlan Erlos). That’s when trouble starts: Valérie’s separation from her husband revives the grievance she carries against Michelle, leading to difficult questions about everyone’s relations, including Michelle’s best friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko), her jailbird son Vincent (Pierre Lottin), and their interconnected fate.
Ozon’s storytelling in When Fall Is Coming (now playing at Film Forum) is also unsentimental, meaning he reverses the usual satire and mocking narrative he’s known for in films about crime and taboo (In the House, Double Lovers, Young and Beautiful) so that Michelle’s retirement years offer plain reflection on life’s ironies. After a career filled with surrealist audacity, Ozon settles for wise contemplation — a new understated classicism that’s as erotic and startling as his familiar impudence.
When it’s revealed that Grandmother Michelle made her fortune as a prostitute with a high-priced clientele, the shock is that Ozon has already prepared us to accept the strange and unexpected. Michelle’s accidental poisoning of Valérie may suggest ulterior motives, but given circumstances and senility, they’re as unknowable as the intentions behind Vincent’s private humor and unmeasured protectiveness. Ozon remains fascinated by existential mystery; compared with Alain Guiraudie’s phantasmagorical Misericordia, his vision seems more uncanny than ever.
Michelle’s blonde coif, sometimes girlishly braided, is part of her proud bearing. Rough-hewn Vincent compliments Michelle, who is as stylish and trim as ever. She rarely smokes but holds a cigarette with striking insolence, like her former colleague and confident Marie-Claude. These women see life as it is and meet it head-on. Michelle’s unfazed, stunned response to the homily at Mass during the opening scene introduces Ozon’s own lack of sentimentality and affirms Ozon’s connection to cinema’s greatest traditions.
Ozon refuses to judge human behavior. This new understatement — as when Vincent roughs up a bar patron who insults Michelle — recalls the “Maison Tellier” segment of Max Ophuls’s Le Plaisir, when a house of prostitutes show humility at a young girl’s Confirmation, rousing our own moral memories. The complexity of Michelle’s maternal attitude toward Vincent and, in turn, Vincent’s fraternal regard of young Lucas evoke sensitivity toward odd personalities and the subtle fulfillment of compassion.
In other films, Ozon’s full humanity was expressed by his recognition of sexual differences. Now he’s beyond such virtue-signaling. Whether Michelle is with Valérie or Marie-Claude or Vincent, or Vincent is with Lucas, they don’t always understand each other, but their rapport gives the film a profound undercurrent.
Mike Leigh presented Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s Pansy with as much sensitivity — and his name-brand comic and dramatic intensity. Ozon sees as deeply, hence the only moment of friction between the two old courtesans, when motherly Marie-Claude complains that “Vincent wants to do right, but he always does wrong” and Michelle defends him: “What matters is he wanted to do right.” Their quandary is perfectly embodied by heavy-lidded Lottin, whose on-screen force recalls Robert Mitchum in The Night of the Hunter. And Michelle’s own motherly misgivings provide Ozon’s only instances of the supernatural when she imagines Valérie in tears. It’s a no-judgment movie, fine enough to be Hard Truths, Part 2.
Destiny, as implied by the title When Fall Is Coming, answers inscrutable day-to-day issues and behavior that too often are treated politically. The facetious feminist inquiry of Anatomy of a Fall comes to mind, as does the puerile salute to “the sex-worker community” by the makers of Anora. Ozon is above all of that, too. He has worked through political fashion (and fashionable scandal) to arrive at deep perception. When members of Michelle’s old community file in to pay their respects at a church service, it’s a quiet memento mori — both a tribute to Ophuls and a reminder of greater forgiveness, as in the Mass that begins Ozon’s drama.