François Ozon’s ‘The New Girlfriend’

The New Girlfriend (Une nouvelle amie) is loosely based on a short story of that name by Ruth Rendell. Two girls, Claire and Laura, meet at school and decide to be friends for life. They grow up and marry and Laura has a baby. She dies soon after the little girl is born - French films are good at funerals. Soon afterwards Claire goes to see widower David to find him wearing his wife’s clothes while bottle-feeding the baby. Having introduced this key aspect so early on that most critics seem to have revealed it, the film turns into a mélange of ambiguous straight, gay and transvestite sexuality.

Ozon is industrious, if nothing else, and this is the fourth of his films that I have posted about in as many years. The New Girlfriend has little in common with Potiche, rather more with the sexuality of Jeune & Jolie, and like In the House uses domestic settings which seem more North American than French. In fact for this film the location for the houses was Quebec, although the offices, hotel and mall scenes were shot in a business district not far from La Defense in Paris.

Roman Duris turns in an excellent performance as David/“Virginia”, appropriately not entirely at ease as either. Anaïs Demoustier’s Claire is the study in confusion one might expect, counterpointed by the tasteful restraint of her wardrobe as opposed to the one David inherits from Laura. Of course there is a long history in British comedy of female characters being played in drag (the Pantomime dame) but in an exaggerated style. Barry Humphries’ Dame Edna Everage and the potter Grayson Perry’s artfully dressed alter ego Claire can be regarded as modern manifestations of that tradition and are both remarkably popular. But there is nothing comic about David and this Claire’s developing relationship and the dark psychological tangle that ensues. Whether Ozon has won the approval of the LGBT etc community/non-community with this film I wouldn’t know – but I would guess not.

The subject matter may or may not be to everyone’s taste, but I thought the weakness of the film was the uneven way in which the plot unrolled: a major revelation early on, a slow evolution and then what turns out to be a not-so dramatic development followed by a brief “Seven years later” sequence at the end. Just what had happened in all that time, when most of the film had been spent covering about the same number of months, we are left to guess at.

John Wells’ ‘August: Osage County’

At the opening of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men, he describes a journey into the interior of Louisiana:

You’ll go past the little white metal squares set on metal rods, with the skull and crossbones on them to mark the spot. For this is the country where the age of the internal combustion engine has come into its own. Where every boy is Barney Oldfield, and the-girls wear organdy and batiste and eyelet embroidery and no panties on account of the climate and have smooth little faces to break your heart and when the wind of the car’s speed lifts up their hair at the temples you see the sweet little beads of perspiration nestling there, and they sit low in the seat with their little spines crooked and their bent knees high toward the dashboard and not too close together for the cool, if you could .call it that, from the hood ventilator.

August: Osage County is set in Oklahoma, less than 100 miles north west of Louisiana and even sultrier. As for the film’s plot, imagine that Edward Albee had written an alternative to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Harold would have had a professorship in Tulsa, Martha would have had three daughters and the fun and games would arise when a Big Chill brings them and other relations back to the family home. Only being a lot further south than New England, there’s some Tennessee Williams spice added. Meryl Streep is, as always, stunning, this time as a monster matriarch, Violet Weston. Julia Roberts, as Violet’s oldest daughter, Barbara, is a true chip off her mother’s block, although in this story the women are all “strong” and the men are limp. Benedict Cumberbatch, Violet’s nephew, does well with his accent, particularly when singing, although his Harrovian sibilants break through at times. Why he and Ewan McGregor (Barbara’s separated husband) were cast is a bit of a mystery – the US isn’t short of acting talent.

This is a film which was originally a play. Sometimes that translation works well, as in The Ides of March, sometimes it shows a little, as in In the House. In this case, it showed a lot, not only in the “exit stage left” comings and goings of the characters in the Westons’ house (how did a couple born so dirt poor acquire so much stuff?), but in the amount of melodramatic speechifying which probably works on the stage but seemed overwrought on the screen. Lloyd Evans, writing in the Spectator, liked the 2008 production in the National Theatre’s Lyttleton and concluded:

At 210 minutes this blisteringly acute, wonderfully funny and deeply heartfelt comedy requires stamina from its audience, but don’t sit back and wait for a revival. This is the production to see. Under Anna D. Shapiro’s direction it runs like a vintage car with every performance tuned to perfection. Look out for Todd Rosenthal’s gracefully soaring set, whose three rickety floors function as a marvellously pragmatic space and as a visual symbol of the family’s psychological fragility. Before last week I’d never heard of Tracy Letts. Now I want a Tracy Letts festival. I can’t be the only one.

So it’s probably worth pointing out that the film is only 121 minutes and also that Letts’ profile in the UK must be higher now, at least as an actor, after playing Senator Andrew Lockhart who became CIA Director during Homeland Season 3. Letts, who was born in Tulsa, won the 2008 Pulitzer Prize for Drama for the play and a Tony Award in 2013 for his portrayal of George in the Broadway revival of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? John Wells’ directing work has been in TV series - ER and The West Wing - rather than cinema. Streep and Roberts have both been nominated for 2014 Oscars and Golden Globes (Leading and Supporting Actress).

François Ozon’s ‘In the House’

François Ozon’s In the House (Dans La Maison) is, as the French say, une autre paire de manches in comparison with his previous film, the comedy Potiche. Like his 8 Women, In the House is based on a play, this one Spanish by Juan Mayorga, The Boy in the Last Row. The boy, Claude Garcia, sits in the back row of a literature class in a French lycée (secondary school) taught by Germain, and the film follows the evolution of their relationship. Germain, motivated by good intentions, at least to start with, and by the interest of his galleriste wife, Jeanne, encourages Claude to write about a fellow pupil, Rapha Artole, and his parents in a series of essays, each ending '(to be continued)'.
 

Early on you feel it’s all going to end badly, and while you wait to find out just how, Ozon explores the relationship between teacher and pupil and the artifices of literature and art (reflecting his apprenticeship with Eric Rohmer), while introducing ambiguities of his own. Of Fabrice Luchini and Kristin Scott Thomas who play Germain and Jeanne (above), Ozon has said:

I have wanted to work with Kristen Scott Thomas for a long time and I just felt that chemistry would work between her and Fabrice because they have the same theatrical background. They also have great comic timing and I think that it works incredibly well. I had in mind the couple of Woody Allen and Diane Keaton in Manhattan - an intellectual couple who are always speaking about intellectual things - and I thought that it would really work between those two actors.

and it does. Ernst Umhauer is equally convincing as the precocious but naive Claude. However, Emmanuelle Seigner has less opportunity to impress in the somewhat characterless role of Mme Artole.

The subtitles are in American English so instead of second year students we get sophomores. But Claude’s fascination with the Artoles as une famille normale is repeatedly mistranslated by referring to them as a perfect family rather than a typical or average one. They might be perfect in American eyes – Rapha and his father’s obsession with basketball, their sharing the same forename, the Artoles’ house, the one Claude is so keen to get inside – all seem more North American than French. The house’s only odd feature is the set of Paul Klee watercolours whose symbolism is revealed to Mme Artole by Claude and whose presence puzzles Jeanne when she reads about them in one of the essays. The French are just as assiduous in demarcating their properties as the British, so the vagueness of the boundaries between chez Artole and the neighbouring park with the bench from which Claude began his observations seems a little unconvincing on film. I can imagine it having worked better on the stage.

Dedicated cinéastes will have views as to whether In the House contains homages to Hitchcock and Allen as well as Rohmer, but apparently it was the art department that prompted the Match Point poster for the cinema queue! A thought-provoking and well-acted film, definitely worth seeing.