23/09/2024 - In François Ozon’s newest film, discontent brews in a cosy autumnal Burgundy village laden with intergenerational guilt, resentment and no way out but onwards

Hélène Vincent (left) and Josiane Balasko in When Fall Is Coming

As neither plant nor animal, mushrooms flourish where many other forms of life fester and rot. In moist and decaying conditions, they often grow hardy and resilient, holding a folkloric association with life and death. Mushrooms like the fausse girolle (false chanterelle) may be enticing to an eager harvester but are known to sometimes be fatally poisonous – joy and tragedy, life and death embedded inextricably in one fungus. And, like indulging in the fausse girolle, filmmaker François Ozon plunges us deep into the Janus-faced familial trappings of the lush Burgundy countryside, where tragedy is just as mundane and commonplace as joy. In his newest film, When Fall Is Coming [+see also:
trailer
film profile], Ozon proposes an autumnal mode of being, a state of being past the point of ripeness, of a waning crescent moon: when forgiveness can no longer be willingly obtained and resentment only evolves into something more confounding. With a script by Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, the film has just had its world premiere as it competes for the Golden Shell in the Official Selection of this year’s San Sebastián International Film Festival.

Ozon sets the scene for a drama of intergenerational trauma by introducing us to the elderly Michelle (Hélène Vincent), who lives out a comfortable retirement in a Burgundy village, with her best friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) frequently accompanying her for coffee and mushroom-gathering walks in the woods. And now is the autumn of our discontent: amidst this seemingly idyllic fall routine comes the destabilising arrival of multiple people. First from Paris comes Michelle’s dismissive daughter Valérie (four-time Ozon collaborator Ludivine Sagnier) with her young son Lucas (Garlan Erlos), the former of whom cannot overcome the bitterness she felt towards her mother during her childhood. Then comes Marie-Claude’s well-meaning but unpredictable son Vincent (Pierre Lottin), who was recently released from prison.

Despite his often ruefully bleak and irresolvable subject matter, Ozon tints his world with an immense amount of cosy, environmental warmth lensed by Jérome Alméras, from Michelle’s homemade meals to the falling of polychromatic leaves around her red-shuttered, stone house. With each often-surprising turn, the story bubbles by at a sometimes offputtingly even pace, as steady-handed as the direction: in some cases, the lack of any sort of climax renders viewers, too, as frustrated as our characters – for better or for worse, but at least making us all empathetic equals (like in Alain Guiraudie’s village-set Misericordia [+see also:
film review
interview: Alain Guiraudie
film profile], conflicts occur, and then we simply must bury it and move on, save for an uneasy laugh). Individual characters are hardly framed alone, with Ozon favouring wide still or tracking shots for outdoor settings that invite the viewer to partake. We never seem to be able to – or want to – leave the glow that permeates everything and everyone, with a colour palette that, slightly ironically, suggests all will be fine, no matter what happens.

And yet, discontent brews beneath the surface: “We failed miserably,” says Marie-Claude to Michelle about their adult children. Like a mirror image, Valérie later utters rhetorically to Vincent: “Can’t you see they wrecked us?” A minor-keyed, piano-heavy score by Evgueni Galperine and Sacha Galperine reminds us, like a tinkling bell in the distance, that some things, if left unresolved, will never be forgotten – with potentially devastating consequences. But on the flip side, says Ozon, life rolls merrily along.

When Fall Is Coming is a French production by Ozon’s FOZ and Mandarin & Compagnie, with Playtime handling its international sales.