Ozon’s Subtle, Surprising Old-Age Study

True to its title, François Ozon’s new film “When Fall is Coming” is awash in the aesthetics of what people far younger than its octogenarian protagonist would call autumncore, with a bit of cottagecore for good measure. In the sleepy, picturesque Burgundy valley where it largely unfolds, the leaves are rusting and crisping, chunky knitwear is coming out of hibernation, and through the screen, you can just about feel the air turning cold enough to splinter. Yet as the film progresses, its timeline spanning months and then years, the weather never changes. The life of sweet-natured retiree Michelle (Hélène Vincent) is seemingly fixed in a perennial fall, as is the film’s mood of quiet, almost comforting melancholy — until, amid this appearance of strange, ochre-hued seasonal stasis, the temperature of proceedings takes a drastic turn south.

An elegant, slippery game of tonal bait-and-switch, “When Fall is Coming” finds the ever-unpredictable Ozon in mellow, pensive mode following the high-camp frippery of last year’s period caper “The Crime is Mine” and his arch Fassbinder reworking “Peter von Kant.” Playing out a narrative of increasingly high-key melodrama in a low-key register, the film steadily picks apart the bucolic idyll of Michelle’s golden years, sliding in the process from ambling character study to cool-blooded thriller in the spirit of Simenon. As a life of leisurely walks and gardening is darkened by emotional torment and potential criminal activity, the film’s playful deceptions prove thematically freighted: Our elders, Ozon reminds us, aren’t always as bland or as benign as we assume. This San Sebastian premiere should prove duly popular with older arthouse audiences rarely represented on screen with such care and daring.

As established in the film’s opening minutes, Michelle’s life is one of gentle, church-going routine and modest, often solitary pleasures: In one afternoon, she picks pumpkins from her vegetable patch, makes them into soup, and sets out a dinner for one with ritualistic precision. There’s no hint in her homey, memento-filled cottage of a husband, past or present, though her bond with nearby best friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) verges on familial. That closeness extends to Marie-Claude’s ne’er-do-well son Vincent (Pierre Lottin), fresh out the slammer, whom Michelle treats with something like a mother’s eternally forgiving patience.

Marie-Claude doesn’t share her friend’s faith in her son, but then sometimes it’s easier to parent children who aren’t your own. Michelle’s relationship with her own daughter is wholly dysfunctional: Flinty, phone-addicted and in the bitter throes of divorce, Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier) visits from Paris positively steaming with resentment toward her desperately hospitable mother. Michelle puts up with this hostility to enjoy the company of her adoring pre-teen grandson Lucas (Garlan Erlos) — though when a dinner of foraged wild mushrooms lands Valérie in hospital with food poisoning, mother-daughter relations take an extra-toxic turn.

It’s an accident that could have happened to anyone, Michelle is assured by doctors, police and Marie-Claude alike, though she’s not so sure: At some level, she wonders, did she wish her daughter harm? It’s the first of several artful pivots — in story, in atmosphere, in our understanding of precisely who these characters are — in a script, by Ozon and Philippe Piazzo, that consistently seeks to surprise viewers without the contrived machinations of outright twists. (It doesn’t, however, entirely pull off some stray flirtations with the supernatural.)

While sudden incidents wrest the plot in new directions, the film is driven less by perverse narrative trickery than by the arbitrary cruelty of fate or the volatility of human nature. Likewise, when disorienting secrets emerge from Michelle’s past, their concealment to that point is as character-revealing as the truths they unveil. Not everything or everyone is a mystery to be dramatically unlocked in “When Fall is Coming”; everyday life is its own puzzle.

A French stage veteran and stalwart screen character actor who won a César for “Life is a Long Quiet River” 35 years ago, Vincent has rarely had a film built quite so devotedly around her presence, and in particular her storied face — closely but tenderly examined throughout by DP Jérome Alméras, in a tawny palette equally alive to flushed skin and turning leaves. The drama here frequently rests on Michelle’s unspoken realizations and shifts in emotional expression, as she wrestles conflicting impulses of shame and defiance, guilt and pique, curiosity and complacency.

There’s sterling support from Balasko, genial but occasionally caustic as a woman less inclined than her friend to skirt hard truths, and particularly Lottin, hitherto best known as a comic player, who brings both goofy affability and a hint of interior chill to a character whose lunkish exterior covers gnawing moral contradictions. Nobody is exactly who they appear to be in “When Fall is Coming,” but Ozon’s nimble, perceptive little film takes that as a given: When winter and mortality are beckoning, the past only counts for so much.