At the outset, it is worth saying a few words about Ozon's directorial style. In particular, he regularly employs first-rate stars: Catherine Deneuve, Charlotte Rampling, Fanny Ardant, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi, etc. One of the reasons for this favour is that Ozon is extremely complimentary of actresses and actors. He knows how to make them look beautiful and sexy, but you can't count on psychological nuance here. Very often, types supplant characters.
Ozone works with static, often frontal shots; if necessary, the camera smoothly and predictably zooms in on the character. There are no mysterious chiaroscuros, sharp editing jerks, paradoxical angles, or meaningful details. It is important for Ozone to see everything as it is.
When it comes to people, Ozone's motion cameras have another peculiarity: they glide over the surface of the body for a long time or look at it at close range in the middle ground. The lens, in fact, turns into a crack. Ozone looks at the characters not only because of love and lust of the flesh. He wants to catch them in the act of transgression. A violation of norms, an outbreak of forbidden passion or a crime. In most films, someone dies, sometimes not their own death.
Of course, in such a reality, the family is a source of misery. Cheating and divorce are commonplace, parenthood is nothing more than a social convention. Any relationship is doomed, and even if we see a seemingly strong partnership, it is bound to be shadowed by an ominous shadow from the past. Ozone does not believe in the happy family, especially the traditional family. It attacks French decency, French life and French Catholic morality through sex, violence and betrayal, it tramples on orderly life, trying to stain it with blood, loss and deviance.
However, When Autumn Falls both falls out of this paradigm and corresponds to it. The protagonist, an elderly lady named Michelle (Hélène Vincent), lives a quiet life in a Burgundian village. Her days consist of gardening, cleaning and cooking. Sometimes she also helps her friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasco), who needs a ride to prison to visit her wayward son Vincent (Pierre Lauten). One day, Michelle's daughter Valerie (Ludivine Sagnier) brings her favourite grandson Lucas (Harlan Erlos) for the holidays. However, the visit goes awry. Michelle treats her daughter to mushrooms that turn out to be poisonous. The relationship between Valerie and her mother is already extremely strained, and now it turns into an open feud: Sagnier's character leaves for Paris with the firm intention of never returning, and, of course, a date with her grandson is out of the question. Soon, Vincent is released, and things get even more complicated, with old skeletons willingly jumping out of modest closets.
Ozone is as honest here as it is possible to be in a fictional story. In the very first minutes, the priest preaches a sermon about Mary Magdalene, so it should come as no surprise when it turns out that the polite grandmothers Michelle and Marie-Claude are former sex workers. And the whole story is a truly autumnal film. Time in this Burgundy valley seems to have stopped in the eternal middle of October. The leaves are red and crunchy, the air is clear and cold, and the landscape is shrouded in a leisurely ochre melancholy.
And the same goes for the direction. It's surprisingly restrained, even shy, with the aforementioned frenzy and corporeality reduced to almost nothing; even the only crime in the film is not shown in the frame, but is indicated by a short dialogue. Hélène Vincent is a star of French theatre, a master of emotional intonation. Ozon habitually tries to squeeze her into a type of "pensioner with a rich past", but the actress works more broadly, more contradictorily: from curiosity to complacency, from shame to rebellion, from irritation to guilt.
In general, all suffering souls find peace here, all sins are forgiven. The other thing is that the film is too compressed, even to the point of plot inconsistencies; when, for example, one of the characters dies, the other characters go on with their lives without any reflection, as if nothing had happened - even though the victim had her own burden of suffering and was definitely not to blame. To be fair, the detective plot has never been Ozone Style's strong suit. But there is a ghost in the film - and this ghost is not so much scary as touching.
When Autumn Falls is a cool, autumnal, little film. It's a no-frills film in every sense.