THESE REMARKS CONTAIN SPOILERS It's Romain's profession to catch the primped parade of fashion models on his Nikon. He rides at the top of a jet-setting business and can afford himself some of its hedonistic self-indulgence: a stylish Paris loft, tony gay clubs, fast expensive cars and Sascha, an in-house lover who supplies erotic amusement. During a rooftop shoot he falls into a faint and wakes to the diagnosis of a tumor that has metastasized beyond cure, leaving him with a few months left to live. After some wrenching tears on a park bench Romain's first response to the devastating news is to end his relationship with Sascha, of whom he was beginning to tire anyway, without ever telling his boyfriend of his mortal illness. This hard-hearted first farewell marks Romain's decision to stage his death alone.
I deliberately write that Romain "stages" his last days. Accustomed as a fashion photographer to total control over a setting, Romain continues his leave-taking on his own terms. His silence on his condition allows him to focus his final moments on those who have meant most to him, less on himself. Those moments, like his snapshot record of them, are a photographer's farewell: pointed on his subjects, a final glimpse into their real candid selves. In his parting embrace of his father - only Romain knows that the gesture is the last - Romain can finally see with clear eyes the two-timing old man who has stayed with his wife all these years because, in the end, he loves her. Romain can redeem an earlier unwarranted attack on his sister (he called her a baby-finessing seductress) with a moving telephoned statement of his tenderness for her. He can watch her pass her quiet elation to her child, unmarred by worry or even the knowledge of his distant presence. In a last encounter Sascha tells Romain that he does not want to humiliate himself by doing Romain sexual favors, as Romain had asked. It is a parting shot of candid honesty - possible only because Sascha remains ignorant of his old boyfriend's sickness - that Romain can accept without resort to bullying nastiness or eliciting pity. Romain, in his detached silence, has given his father, sister and friend the most generous of farewells by allowing them to be themselves. Only to his grandmother (Jeanne Moreau in unsurpassed grandiloquence) does Romain tell of his illness - because she's going to die soon herself, he says. Her natural camera pose is of a person herself close to death; she will love Romain as he is and not mourn him.
Romain's self-staged farewell spawns a legacy that includes more than acceptance and forgiveness. A waitress (a wonderfully bewildered Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) asks him to stand in for her infertile husband. The ludicrous menage-à-trois of impregnation that follows may be over the top, but is in keeping with Romain's careful, disciplined staging of his death rite. It is part of the drama of Romain's last days that will now have even produced a son.
In addition to Romain's photographic record of his farewell (part of which puzzled me: an early disturbing still, just after their break-up, of Sascha asleep with blood stigmata on his temple: the wounds Romain inflicted in dumping him?) François Ozon punctuates his film with the record of Romain's flashbacks to his childhood. In one especially amusing scene Romain, as a little boy, urinates into a vessel of holy water. These flashbacks are Romain's encounters with unencumbered innocence and with the now-lost intimacy with his sister, as he tries to close the circle of his life. He can recover that intimacy and innocence only in keeping his disease from those close to him - their sorrow would only hinder his intentions. In his refusal to be their patient, he has become their confessor. The film senses the deep irony of a dying man whose unaffected portraits of people special to him are the product of his deliberate design. The self-centered hedonism of the fashion photographer (which has destroyed Romain's intimacy with his sister) curiously proves the wellspring of Romain's theatre of forgiveness and redemption. If his pleasure-seeking ways had once kept him aloof from his family and lovers, he will in death take the barriers down, ironically enough by putting up a last barrier of silence. (Romain's dream of sexual contact with his doctor is a mark not of his lust but a simple desire for intimacy.)
The movie is wise in making no apologies for Romain's pleasure-seeking life as a successful fashion photographer, though the decision to make him gay is perhaps an unfortunate stress on an epicurean stereotype. Melvil Poupard portrays Romain with the right touch of wry ennui (emaciated at the end), as one who accepts his ways even as he tries to see past them into understanding and acceptance of those close to him. He stages his death with a demonstrative self-consciousness by returning to the child at the edge of the ocean with which the movie began. The dying Romain has an ice cream, throws out his cell phone, grants himself a last swim and lays himself on the beach as if on a bier. He hands a beach ball to his boyhood self, their only "contact." After silent farewells to so many others, Romain in this last gesture at last takes leave of himself, alone in the death he himself has staged.
I deliberately write that Romain "stages" his last days. Accustomed as a fashion photographer to total control over a setting, Romain continues his leave-taking on his own terms. His silence on his condition allows him to focus his final moments on those who have meant most to him, less on himself. Those moments, like his snapshot record of them, are a photographer's farewell: pointed on his subjects, a final glimpse into their real candid selves. In his parting embrace of his father - only Romain knows that the gesture is the last - Romain can finally see with clear eyes the two-timing old man who has stayed with his wife all these years because, in the end, he loves her. Romain can redeem an earlier unwarranted attack on his sister (he called her a baby-finessing seductress) with a moving telephoned statement of his tenderness for her. He can watch her pass her quiet elation to her child, unmarred by worry or even the knowledge of his distant presence. In a last encounter Sascha tells Romain that he does not want to humiliate himself by doing Romain sexual favors, as Romain had asked. It is a parting shot of candid honesty - possible only because Sascha remains ignorant of his old boyfriend's sickness - that Romain can accept without resort to bullying nastiness or eliciting pity. Romain, in his detached silence, has given his father, sister and friend the most generous of farewells by allowing them to be themselves. Only to his grandmother (Jeanne Moreau in unsurpassed grandiloquence) does Romain tell of his illness - because she's going to die soon herself, he says. Her natural camera pose is of a person herself close to death; she will love Romain as he is and not mourn him.
Romain's self-staged farewell spawns a legacy that includes more than acceptance and forgiveness. A waitress (a wonderfully bewildered Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) asks him to stand in for her infertile husband. The ludicrous menage-à-trois of impregnation that follows may be over the top, but is in keeping with Romain's careful, disciplined staging of his death rite. It is part of the drama of Romain's last days that will now have even produced a son.
In addition to Romain's photographic record of his farewell (part of which puzzled me: an early disturbing still, just after their break-up, of Sascha asleep with blood stigmata on his temple: the wounds Romain inflicted in dumping him?) François Ozon punctuates his film with the record of Romain's flashbacks to his childhood. In one especially amusing scene Romain, as a little boy, urinates into a vessel of holy water. These flashbacks are Romain's encounters with unencumbered innocence and with the now-lost intimacy with his sister, as he tries to close the circle of his life. He can recover that intimacy and innocence only in keeping his disease from those close to him - their sorrow would only hinder his intentions. In his refusal to be their patient, he has become their confessor. The film senses the deep irony of a dying man whose unaffected portraits of people special to him are the product of his deliberate design. The self-centered hedonism of the fashion photographer (which has destroyed Romain's intimacy with his sister) curiously proves the wellspring of Romain's theatre of forgiveness and redemption. If his pleasure-seeking ways had once kept him aloof from his family and lovers, he will in death take the barriers down, ironically enough by putting up a last barrier of silence. (Romain's dream of sexual contact with his doctor is a mark not of his lust but a simple desire for intimacy.)
The movie is wise in making no apologies for Romain's pleasure-seeking life as a successful fashion photographer, though the decision to make him gay is perhaps an unfortunate stress on an epicurean stereotype. Melvil Poupard portrays Romain with the right touch of wry ennui (emaciated at the end), as one who accepts his ways even as he tries to see past them into understanding and acceptance of those close to him. He stages his death with a demonstrative self-consciousness by returning to the child at the edge of the ocean with which the movie began. The dying Romain has an ice cream, throws out his cell phone, grants himself a last swim and lays himself on the beach as if on a bier. He hands a beach ball to his boyhood self, their only "contact." After silent farewells to so many others, Romain in this last gesture at last takes leave of himself, alone in the death he himself has staged.
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