TIME TO LEAVE (François Ozon, 2005)

Melvil Poupaud (best actor, Valladolid) claims the role of a lifetime in writer-director François Ozon’s exquisite Le temps qui reste, which mines (a bit spottily) some of the same mysterious terrain where life and death cross as in his best film, Sous le sable (Under the Sand, 2000). (Once again we’re on the beach.) Poupaud beautifully plays Romain, a 31-year-old fashion photographer who learns he has an inoperable malignant tumor that has metastasized, leaving him with less than a 5% chance of survival even with chemotherapy. The potential for losing his hair is among the factors leading Romain to reject chemotherapy; Romain opts instead for no treatment, but near the end shaves his head as a triumph against vanity. It is quite an odyssey that takes Romain from one emotional place to another.
     At first, Romain tells no one of his terminal illness and brusquely, even cruelly, pushes them away. This includes his sister, with whom he was especially close in childhood, and his lover, Sasha, with whom he breaks off their relationship. “Why have you told me?” his grandmother (Jeanne Moreau, tough/fragile, warm, loving) asks when he confides in only her. “Because you’re like me. You also will die soon.”
     Nonsensically and manipulatively, Romain’s path crosses that of a waitress whose spouse is sterile and who asks Romain to have sex with her so that the couple can have a child—and possibly a very good-looking one! This contrivance is redeemed by the fact that the lovemaking scene is itself wonderful: all three in bed together, with waves of tenderness in all directions.
     Romain drifts in and out of childhood memories. On the beach where he dies with the sun, Romain earlier passes a stray ball to the young boy he once was.

BED AND BOARD (François Truffaut, 1970)

There are at least two opposite ways to consider the fourth film in François Truffaut’s semi-autobiographical Antoine Doinel cycle, Domicile conjugal. If we take one view, Antoine (once again, and necessarily, Jean-Pierre Léaud) disintegrates into a bourgeois groove of complacency that completes the undoing of the rambunctious personality he exhibited in his mid-teens in The 400 Blows (1959). An inside-out view, though, suggests an alternative possibility: Antoine is still himself but is torn between impulses and the need to negotiate with the ordinary world which is poised to brand him “success” or “failure,” between what he wants to be and what the world has repeatedly told him he ought to be. The first view yields a captivating comedy; with the second view, however, everything, including Antoine’s marriage to Christine, is weighed against the boy that Antoine once was and, however dim his memory of this earlier incarnation, still keenly feels. The outcome of this view, close to devastating, suggests that our earlier selves aren’t always something we grow out of but with which some of us must constantly contend. Either way, Domicile conjugal ends the series, in effect leaving Antoine Doinel behind. (Truffaut, pursuing career resuscitation, belatedly added another film to it—one that overtly casts a backward look.)
     Antoine’s infidelity is both exotic—his partner in extramarital sex is Japanese—and tawdry. Antoine desperately sounds out his love for Christine, his commitment to their marriage, his connection to the raw being we all recall he once was. By degrees he has slipped into a role that periodically erupts into nonsense as he hopes against hope he can control his marital (and every other sort of) environment. “I’m never bored!” he announces.
     But are you scared? Dear Antoine, that’s what we want to know.