When Fall is Coming (Ozon, 2025)
I don’t know if it is accurate to call director François Ozon a critic’s darling, but I note that his last fifteen films, over a span of eighteen years, are all rated “fresh” on the Rotten Tomatoes aggregator. This remarkable run of consistent quality leads me to wonder whether if he were American — or even just making more films in English — whether his reputation would have him ranked much higher in the hierarchy of living auteurs.
When Fall is Coming is Ozon’s latest film, now available on Blu-ray from Music Box. The main character is Michelle (Hélène Vincent) who, when the film opens, is preparing for a visit from her adult daughter, Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier) and her grandson, Lucas. Valérie is so hostile to her mother that it is hard not to rush to conclusions about her, which seems like a big part of the point of the movie. When Valérie eats some toxic mushrooms prepared by her mother, she claims that it was intentional, that Michelle was trying to murder her, and she retaliates by refusing her mother any further contact with her grandson.
As is typical of much of Ozon’s writing, the screenplay here gradually reveals more about the characters. Rarely does this writing tendency out and out falsify some assumption or inference about a character, but it often leads to doubts and second-guessing. In a more commercial studio film there would probably be some definitive evidence to signal what kind of outcome the audience should root for. Here we see Michelle devastated at the loss of contact with her grandson, but we also see her uncertain herself whether there may have been an unconscious desire to punish her daughter. Eventually some of her friends intervene in different ways and motives becomes murkier as mixed motives get overlaid with secrets.
The writing feature that keeps this as second tier Ozon is that the film withholds some information from the audience regarding at least one key plot point. It is easy to understand why, but I tend to think that it would have been possible to show the key scene while retaining some ambiguity. It is not even as though this is an inherently bad way of storytelling, but it is at odds with the rest of the movie which tends to look for deeper ambiguity in motives rather than superficial ambiguity about what actually happened. That quibble aside, there is plenty to unpack here, and Ozon does have a gift for avoiding obvious plot beats that you might be expecting.
