Stunning, controversial, challenging film-maker Francois Ozon has seen some of his classic short films remastered and reissued uncut, thanks to queer film distributors nqv.
This collection of five has Ozon’s trademarks – beautiful, haunting cinematography, an erotic fascination for naked bodies, twists, turns, and sometimes horrific or at least disturbing outcomes. It’s a thoughtful and thought-provoking selection.
A Summer Dress sees two gay lovers fall out on their seaside vacation. Luc has a chance encounter while naked sunbathing on the beach with Lucia who leads him off ino a cruising ground for sex – his first with a woman. Discovering his belongings have been stolen, he has to borrow Lucia’s dress and cycle back to boyfriend Sebastian – an encounter which seems to spark off a passionate session of love-making. When he tries to return the dress the following day, Lucia tells him to keep it. It’ s a sort of liberating cross-gender symbol of queer love – wonderfully captured.
X2000 is altogether more disturbing and puzzling. Waking up on the morning after the night before, on New Year’s Day 2000, the central male character leaves a much older woman in his bed to discover partygoers in this empty apartment, who to our eyes have the look of death upon them. When an infestation of ants is discovered, the story veers offcourse.
Truth Or Dare starts as a harmless, innocent adolescent game among two men and two women, where all the challenges are based on sex. But there’s an in-our-face revelation between the two women that pulls the viewer up short. Simple but shocking.
The most disturbing of the collection is See The Sea – again set in an apparently idyllic sea-side holiday home. Sasha is with her constantly irritable baby Siofra, waiting for the return of her husband from a business trip. When back-packing traveller Tatiana asks to pitch her tent in the spacious yard, there develops a thinly veiled sexual encounter between the two women that has a bloody and tragic outcome. A film full of menace in miniature, with sharply delineated performances – not least by the toddler!
The finale is A Little Death, in which we meet Paul, a young gay photographer whose current subject matter is to capture the exact moment of male sexual climax. When his sister insists Paul visits his dying but estranged father, Paul uses the opportunity as a photographic exercise which is very disturbing but which seems to assuage years of guilt and regret.
In these shorts, Ozon creates a world where the mundane takes on symbolic and often sinister aspects but where the stories and beautiful bodies absolutely engross us.
The films are available on Prime and Vimeo and on Peccadillo Pictures On Demand. Details at nqvmedia.co
