François Ozon’s ‘When Fall Is Coming’ Secures Swathe of Global Sales

SAN SEBASTIAN — In bumper deals, premier French production-sales agency Playtime has secured a raft of sales across key territories for François Ozon’s “When Fall Is Coming,” which bows in San Sebastian’s main Competition. 

Distribution so far takes in major territories such as Italy (Bim Distribuzione), CIS (A-One Russia), Spain (Caramel + La Zona), and Axia in Canada.

Playtime has cut further deals with Vertigo Media in Hungary, September Films in Benelux, Panda in Austria, Aurora in Poland, Filmcoopi in Switzerland, A-One Baltics, Outsider Film in Portugal, Filmtrade in Greece, Beta Films in Bulgaria, and Arthouse Traffic in Ukraine. 

The pre-sales come on a film whose complex story is seemingly told effortlessly. 

Perhaps it’s the moment two elderly friends, Michelle and Marie-Claude, leave the woods with wild mushrooms and laugh when Marie-Claude tells her friend to let her know how it goes. Perhaps it’s when we see Michelle preparing and lingering with one of the mushrooms before adding to the bowl with the others. Perhaps Michelle, in her countryside idyll is not as sweet as being elderly can stereotypically invoke. 

It would be easy to pick any number of moments from the film to add questions to the mix. 

Ozon tells his questioning tale through the familiar domesticity of the garden, the dinner table, the stroll along a path with her grandson, but in doing so piles up moral complexity, personal history and intrigue.

“It’s like in life, you don’t control everything, and you don’t know everything.” François Ozon told Variety. “Very often, you make mistakes in your life because you think you have an interpretation of a situation, of the reality, and you realize maybe 10 years after that you were wrong.” His storytelling in the film reflects the evasions we all make, “Sometimes you decide not to know. You prefer to sweep it under the carpet. It’s easier, I think, to survive.” 

For Ozon, withholding key moments is essential, “the audience is clever. I like the fact that all the story is very ambiguous. Where is the bad? Where is the good? It’s up to you.”

“When Fall Is Coming” stars Hèléne Vincent as Michelle and reunites the director with Ludivine Sagnier, who plays her 40-year-old daughter Valérie with an angry, city-worn intensity. Strong support comes from Pierre Lottin as Marie-Claude’s adult son and newcomer Garlan Erlos as Sagnier’s young son Lucas. Cesar winner Josiane Balasko, well known for her comedic turns, is Marie-Claude, embodying a different kind of resilience than Michelle. “Michelle is a force of nature. She wants to live. She doesn’t want to be destroyed by the grief [of what happens.] For Marie-Claude, it’s something totally different, because she’s consumed by guilt. She feels totally guilty.” 

In “When Fall Is Coming” older women and their often under-explored stories come to the fore. Ozon wanted, in part, to challenge stereotypes around elderly women in cinema: “I wanted to kill this cliché. It was very important to make a film with the leads as old actresses, because too often they are just a supporting part, a caricature, and they don’t have a place in the film. For this, I wanted to have them at the center of the film,” he said.

Produced by Ozon’s ownFOZ Production in co-production with France 2 Cinéma and Playtime, “When Fall Is Coming” marks another entry in his prolific and immensely varied career by modern standards. 

“I like diversity in cinema. I like to change. I like to make a film in contrast to the one I’ve just finished. In cinema, I like not to repeat myself,”  

Many filmmakers struggle to produce films and forge long careers. Practicality has helped Ozon, “I come from short films. We had no money, so we made films with no money. I had to know the price of things,” he said, recalling  “Eric Rohmer, when he taught, never spoke about intellectual things, not at all. He told us only about economy and money. He was obsessed with the price of where he bought the cheapest carpet in Paris for the ‘Les Nuits de la pleine lune’ and so on.” 

As his latest gears up for its Competition slot in San Sebastian, Ozon’s sustained and prolific career forges on.