Francois Ozon’s layers

Out magazine, 2010

“I think I would have been a very good director for the ’40s and ’50s in Hollywood,” says the French filmmaker Francois Ozon. “Do a drama, a musical, a Western.” Except his résumé goes more like this: bisexual short subject, elegant death meditation, musical murder mystery. His latest depicts a pregnant woman detoxing from heroin in the French countryside. “I don’t want to repeat myself,” he says.

This is understatement. Fifteen years ago, Ozon was the transgressive’s transgressive, cinema’s enfant most terrible. His first full-length film, 1998s Sitcom, wove incest and bestiality into a pitch-black comedy about a disintegrating family. A follow-up, Criminal Lovers, involved a thrill-killing teen couple who flee into the forest, where they’re imprisoned by a woodsman who indoctrinates the boy to gay sex (and, perhaps, love!).

But instead of crafting slight twists on the same shock wave and fashioning himself a kind of Gallic John Waters, Ozon quickly proved he was capable of devastating emotional realism. In 2000’s Under the Sand, Ozon cast Charlotte Rampling as a professor whose husband disappears during a beach holiday, but she proceeds through life as if he’s still alive. Having flirted with flashy transgression and quiet dignity, Ozon deviated from each, contenting himself to be restless, jumping from genre to genre.

His two biggest hits followed. Swimming Pool was a psychological thriller about an uptight mystery writer (Rampling again) who becomes entangled with her publisher’s promiscuous, violent daughter. 8 Women gathered French cinema icons like Catherine Deneuve and Isabelle Huppert in a candy-colored murder-mystery musical. Reviewers of the former referenced Hitchcock; of the latter, one said Ozon had out-Almodovar’ed Almodovar.

Today, Ozon seems abashed about Criminal Lovers: “When I was younger, I think I was more aggressive.” He’s 12 floors above midtown Manhattan in a boutique hotel, in town for the U.S. premiere of his latest film, Hideaway (Le Refuge), at Lincoln Center. When speaking, his rs soften into ws; he wears a striped ascot tucked into a button-down shirt, and it works for him. “Because it was one of my first films, I had many things to say, and sometimes it was a little bit messy. You know—it was maybe too provocative.”

Hideaway is almost deafeningly quiet. It concerns a junkie whose boyfriend dies, leaving her pregnant. His bourgeois family asks her to abort; she refuses. She flees to the family summer home, where she’s joined by her late boyfriend’s gay brother. The film is conversational, contemplative. “Doing film after film, you realize you can say very transgressive things in a better way,” says Ozon. With its depiction of an improvised family, Hideaway achieves that. It is also kind of boring. Ozon seems used to this complaint. “And now,” he sighs, “there are some people who think I’m not provocative enough.”

Ozon got his first major attention with the 1996 short film A Summer Dress. In it, a young man, on vacation with his boyfriend, has sex with a girl in the forest, loses his clothes, and has to bike home in her frock. “At this time in France, the gay community was paralyzed by AIDS,” says Ozon. “And suddenly there was this small thing that said you can still have sex, you just need to use a condom. People were so happy to see that it was still possible to have a nice sexuality and to have fun. The gay community was very fond of the film, and people used it like a gay flag.”

His next projects, Criminal Lovers and Water Drops on Burning Rocks (an adaptation of a Fassbinder play about a young man who leaves his girlfriend for a manipulative older man and spends a lot of time walking around in skimpy underwear), made him an exciting new gay voice not just in film, but in art in general. But Ozon has been discontent to tote any banners, gay or otherwise. “My films are more about identity,” he says. “I like to speak about people who haven’t yet decided who they are.”

Hideaway, like many of Ozon’s films, hinges on loneliness. Although he decries the idea that it’s an essential gay quality— “That’s a cliché”—it is essential to Ozon himself, who “grew up with four siblings at my back. I like loneliness,” he says. “I need loneliness. I like the idea of having someone to love or to like and to have friends, but I need to be lonely at some moments. It’s something sad, but at the same time, it gives you strength to accept yourself, to become yourself.”

In Ozon’s films, marriages fizzle excruciatingly. Long-term loves commit suicide and/or disappear into the sea. Dissatisfied people contract terminal diseases and die dissatisfied. In 2006’s Time to Leave, a photographer learns he has cancer, dumps his beautiful boyfriend and sets out on a last road trip. The work seems to be the product of a mind with a deep pessimism about relationships. Ozon disagrees. “I think it’s a realistic view,” he says. “When you go to cinema, of course you want to dream. The truth is less dreamy. It is difficult to build a love story. But when you know the truth, you are able to accept the difficulty of life. I prefer to imagine the worst. So when something good happens, I’m happy.”

Today Ozon won’t discuss his own relationship status (“It’s private; it’s secret”) but says he has been in love more than once, experiences that were less traumatic than his cinematic output would suggest. “For me, it’s always a good experience, even if it’s traumatic, he says. It’s better to have experience than not. Love is a kind of illusion, but it’s good to believe in illusion. If you don’t believe in illusion, you don’t go to cinema, you don’t do anything. So you have to have illusions.”

Ozon grew up in a bourgeois family with four siblings; in the past he has hinted at deep-seated issues that now seem resolved. “It’s OK now. Long story,” is all he will say. “When I did Sitcom, I was very aggressive and had some issues against families. With time, I understood that you need family. Its not always a pleasure, but the family is the way to build yourself. It’s the kind of attachment you can’t really cut. It’s civilization, so you have to deal with it. I like, in my movies, to show some new families. There’s the family you have to deal with and the family you choose. And maybe this kind of utopian idealism exists in my films.”

When starting out, he had no qualms about addressing gay themes. (This was, remember, the era of Todd Haynes’s Poison inciting the wrath of Jesse Helms.) “It’s only in America that I get these questions,” he says. “No, for us, cinema is the most important thing. In America, what’s important is first your sexuality, and then [the fact that] you’re a director. In France, first you are a director, and then maybe after that you have a sexuality. This idea of minority is very important in America. Here, everyone is fighting for the rights of the gay, the black, the Jew. In France, you are never classified by your race, your sexuality, your color. You are equal to everybody. I’m sure there are many gay directors, but the audience doesn’t know.”

So why are there no out leading actors in France? “I know so many,” says Ozon. “But there’s not this phenomenon of outing. People don’t really care. People are happy when people have sex. We know our president has sex with many women, and we are happy for him. If he does that, it means he’s in good health and he’s full of desire. It’s better than to have no sexuality or to be aggressive or to make a war against Iraq because he doesn’t have a woman to fuck.”

On the subject of sex, Ozon perks up. (On other topics, he ranges from guarded to impatient.) Onscreen, his depiction of it has varied as much as his material. While Time to Leave featured a sex scene with prosthetic erections, an intimate moment in Hideaway happens in inscrutable darkness. But Ozon says he hasn’t mellowed that much. “I actually had some strange positions in mind,” he says. “I knew it would be very surprising to see a pregnant woman having sex. It’s very erotic to me, the idea of a pregnant woman. For me, as a peeping tom, it was more interesting to see her having sex with her big belly, in a strange position. I thought it could be an amazing frame.” Ultimately, the actress refused to do the scene. “It wasn’t the story,” shrugs Ozon. “There are good accidents for films sometimes.”

He adds: “I know directors who hate sex scenes, or they pretend to hate them. For me, it’s always a pleasure, like a game. I direct them as if I were in a porn movie. What interests me about sex scenes is that you can’t hide, you can’t cheat. I have the feeling that the body can’t lie.”

Curiously, as Ozon’s career has progressed, he has retreated from exploring gay relationships. In his work today, gay people are often beside the point. His 2004 film, 5x2, illustrated the disintegration of a heterosexual marriage; the principal character’s gay brother was a sideline. In Hideaway, the gay character Paul is central but ultimately a pretty cipher, while Isabelle Carr’s Mousse is undeniably the focus. Why not make a gay version of 5x2? “Maybe I will do that one time, but I wanted something very simple and very universal,” says Ozon. “A straight couple is more universal than a gay couple. When I did Water Drops on Burning Rocks, I didn’t care that they were gay. For me, it’s not important if they’re gay or straight—no, it’s a couple.”

Although Ozon’s latest projects have moved toward the mainstream — Angel, his first English-language film, was a period piece based on a book by British novelist Elizabeth Taylor, and Ricky was a fantasy about an infant who grew wings — the director says he doesn’t want to work in Hollywood, or in America generally. “What for?” he says. “I had many propositions after Swimming Pool. I think if I came here, Id lose my freedom. I wouldn’t have final cut. In France, the director is the most important thing in the film. In America, the producer is the most important person. I’m afraid if people want to produce me it would be to remake my success, not try something new.”

Ozon’s next film is Potiche, an adaptation of the source material for the 1969 comedy Cactus Flower. It stars Catherine Deneuve and Gerard Depardieu in a comedy about a trophy wife in late-’70s Paris who comes into her own. “It’s a feminist film,” says Ozon. This will be his second film with Deneuve; he has done three with Rampling and has said he prefers hiding behind divas. “I think because I have more distance, I’m more lucid about women than men,” says Ozon. “And I love to work with actresses. I think they’re more clever than actors—they’re more able to take risks.”

The love is apparently hard-earned: Deneuve called working with Ozon on 8 Women difficult and complained that “he treated us like the commander of a troop.” But he was “very precise,” Deneuve said. “The interesting thing is that he would do the camera himself, which is very rare. He knew exactly what he wanted.”

That apparently depends on the film. Ozon isn’t sure what his next project will be after Potiche; he says he has to finish one film before he can decide on the next. Having rebelled and matured, he broke molds but didn’t set out to fill any voids. “I didn’t ask myself those kinds of questions,” he says. “When you make a film, you just have to be as honest as you can. But I have no theory and no message. I don’t want to have a message about anything—just questions.”