“Time to Leave” is the slimmest film yet from the prolific French director Francois Ozon, whose movies have included a teasingly sexy mystery (“Swimming Pool”), a somber meditation on death (“Under the Sea”), and a campy musical (“8 Women”).
In “Time to Leave,” Ozon looks as though he’s going to tread a conventional path: A young man learns that he has terminal cancer, and must face the remaining weeks of his life.
Ozon’s twist is that this young man, a fashion photographer named Romain (Melvil Poupaud), doesn’t actually take the usual forms of closure. He goes to visit his parents and his sister, almost works up the nerve to reveal his illness, but decides not to tell them anything.
He does visit his grandmother (French screen legend Jeanne Moreau) and confides to her. When it comes to life and death, she’s as unsentimental as Romain.
Romain makes no grand statements or actions. He initially pushes away his boyfriend, but then has regrets.
Rated: Not rated; probably NC-17 for nudity Now showing: Varsity
Boring: A young man (Melvil Poupaud) learns he has only a few weeks to live; his final days are spent in decidedly undramatic fashion. Director Francois Ozon almost seems to have designed this movie as a response against the usual melodrama of such a story, which leaves it a difficult film to latch onto. (In French, with English subtitles.)
The biggest possibility for melodrama comes when a stranger (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) asks Romain if he would consider impregnating her; she and her husband can’t conceive. In the hands of Ron Howard, this proposition might become the basis for a feel-good story about Romain passing along his genes before he dies. With Ozon, everything is underplayed, and it works as a subtle final gesture.
The cumulative effect of the film’s subtlety makes it hard to latch onto this movie, however. You can appreciate Ozon’s decision to play it cool, and in the final sequences this approach creates beauty (Ozon brings the story to the seaside, which seems to operate as a vision of eternity in many of his films).
But somehow this feels more like a short story than a movie. A few years ago, a French director made a film about a man dying of AIDS, “Savage Nights,” which starred the director himself – during his own battle with AIDS. That film, though rather disorganized, was full of rage against the night. “Time to Leave” is like an answer to that movie, but with acceptance, not rage. An interesting approach, but also undramatic.
Melvil Poupaud and Jeanne Moreau in “Time to Leave.”
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