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The filmmaker’s 23rd feature film, which films old age with rare respect for his grandmother character, turns into a mini-country thriller when her daughter suddenly dies. Gentle and without spiciness.
We cannot say that fiction has the habit of granting the slightest consideration to old people. Except for complacently filming their decrepitude, because this kind of thing, as everyone knows, scares people or makes them cry. François Ozon must have realized this when he decided to shout out the quiet, even enviable, truth of a retired life, without us immediately understanding what the interest is supposed to be about. This is the 23rd feature film from the inexhaustible author, whose films sometimes seem to flow out like a faucet, at the rate of one per year, to drink or eat. Our heroine, Michelle, has long buried a scandalous past, and lives her uneventful routine between Sunday mass, her Burgundy vegetable garden and trips with her friend Marie-Claude, whose grown-up son has just come out of jail.
Rather deviating from his taste for playful devices, François Ozon does not leave any trace of irony, even muted, in the vicinity of this granny cake (Hélène Vincent), returned to her joys and her sorrows as a character, sinking into depression on day when her vixen daughter deprives her of visits from her grandson. No doubt the film even invites us to gauge ourselves in the white-collar arrogance of Ludivine Sagnier, in the role of the ungrateful offspring, screwed with stress and contempt for the life of a Parisian. The kind who only drops by his mother’s house to throw out the usual nonsense and tax money. We would kill her with our own hands. Phew, a
