Synopsis

Romain, 31, a photographer, learns that a malignancy may kill him within a few months. Decisions: treatment? work? how to tell his lover and his family.

He remembers the sea and himself as a child. He stares in the mirror. He’s cruel: facing death, he pushes people away – what’s the point? He visits his grandmother to tell her; on the way, he chats briefly with a waitress.

He looks at old photos, visits a childhood tree house. He takes pictures. Returning from his grandmother’s, he stops for food and sees the waitress, Jany, again. She makes a request.

 

He returns to an empty flat – his lover has left. Can Jany’s proposition give him a way to move past self-pity?  -- IMDb

Cast: Melvil Poupaud, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Jeanne Moreau, Daniel Duval, Marie Rivière, Louise-Anne Hippeau, Christian Sengewald, Henri Le Lorme, Walter Pagano, Ugo Soussan Trabelsi

Cannes (Un Certain Regard), Toronto (Contemporary World Cinema), London (Film on the Square), Stockholm, Outfest (Features)


The extraordinarily prolific director François Ozon notches up another trenchant character study, one of his best, although unusually here the focus is on a man rather than a woman.

Romain (Melvil Poupaud - excellent), a young, gay photographer, learns he has less than a year to live. He feels unable to tell those closest to him, and attempts to resolve the unfinished problems in his life, possibly finding redemption for a life devoted to selfish hedonism.

Romain is hardly a sympathetic character - he is difficult, cruel, selfish and, when he finally confides his illness to his grandmother (Jeanne Moreau), he touchingly tells her it is because she will die soon too and will therefore understand.

Yet this latter scene is the best in the film - Moreau gives the cameo of the year as the still-beguiling elderly woman in a sensitive performance laced with warmth and dry wit. The trajectory of the plot may sound familiar, but the director's skill and rejection of cliché gradually build up to a highly moving crescendo, set - where else for an Ozon film? - on the beach. -- Alex Davidson