Francois Ozon's Hot Water
by Loren King
|
Francois Ozon's
Water Drops on
Burning Rocks
|
French film director Francois Ozon recalls a visit to Germany with his
family when he was a boy. The 12-year-old brought a copy of The Diary
of Anne Frank and showed it to his German playmates who had never
been told about the famous book or its young author.
"I was provocative. I was perverse," says Ozon, now 32 and still living
in his native Paris. "I showed a friend the book, which was very
controversial for me."
Ozon is still a provocateur, still controversial, and still fascinated
by German social and cultural mores. His fourth film, Water Drops on Burning
Rocks is adapted from a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, the
late, gay bad boy of post-war German cinema. Fassbinder wrote the
largely-autobiographical, little-performed work when he was just 19.
Fassbinder died in 1982 at age 36.
In Water Drops on Burning Rocks, an aging Lothario (played by
popular French actor Bernard Giraudeau) seduces Franz (Malik Zidi), a
young man barely out of his teens, and the couple then moves swiftly
into the drudgery and despair of domesticity. "I wanted to capture that
teenage feeling when you are young and fall in love with the wrong
person ... when you are in love with someone you despise, and when you
want to destroy the thing you love," says Ozon in a telephone interview
from Paris, where he is editing his fifth film. "I recognize myself when
I was young in Franz. And I recognize myself in Leopold."
Fassbinder's fans will recognize some of the German director's
trademarks in Ozon's film. The single-setting of Leopold's apartment and
its claustrophobic domestic drama echoes The Bitter Tears of Petra von
Kant. The bleak view of relationships, the dark humor, the gay
themes, the fascination with the lurid and the eccentric, all resonate
in Ozon's so far small but distinct output of films. Ozon is too young
to have seen Fassbinder's films in their initial release during the
1970s, but he discovered them later, starting with the cult classic
Fox and His Friends,
which also stars Fassbinder as a gay man used by a bourgeois circle.
"I didn't want to adapt a play. But I wanted to make a film about a
couple, about my own experience," Ozon says in his impressive but
halting English. "But I had no distance from it; it was too close. Then
I remembered seeing this play in Paris. I realized that all that I
wanted to say was in this play. It was a way to pay tribute to
Fassbinder. I love the way he worked his themes; he is the most
important German director since the war and the only one to talk about
bad things in German history."
Ozon balanced Fassbinder's "dark feeling about relationships" and "humor
that is a kind of violence" with his own lighter, more optimistic, more
traditionally French cinematic style. Water Drops on Burning
Rocks, which Ozon updates from the '60s to the '70s, is filled with
bright, deco-style sets and props. Again, Ozon traces his attraction to
the juxtaposition of German solemnity and French joie de vivre to
those family trips to Germany.
"When I was young, Germany was so special to me because everything was
so clean and modern compared with Paris, which was so old," he says. "In
France, we eat a big lunch with meat and dessert. In Germany, I ate
sandwiches. For a French boy, it was special to have salt and sugar at
the same time. I remember, too, the dark, dull color. Germans felt
guilty, I think, about the war, still."
Ozon notes that Fassbinder's play ended on a characteristic pessimistic,
disturbing note. "I changed it to a more optimistic ending," he says,
"but while I was editing, I realized Fassbinder was right." So Ozon
changed the final scene of Water Drops on Burning Rocks back to
Fassbinder's original, macabre one.
|
|
Criminal Lovers
|
Ozon's career began as a youngster shooting his siblings with a Super-8
movie camera. He graduated from France's prestigious Femis film school,
where he credits director Eric Rohmer with nurturing his talent, and
immediately became known as a prolific filmmaker with offbeat tastes.
His short film See the
Sea triggered controversy at film festivals for its depiction of
a woman terrorized by an intruder. This year, Ozon's third film, Criminal Lovers, earned
mixed reviews for its re-working of Hansel and Gretel in this
true story about a pair of homicidal teens who hole up in a remote cabin
after their killing spree. "It was controversial because a lot of people
did not like the fairy tale twist," says Ozon. "It is amoral; so it can
be disturbing."
It is this interest in bizarre, anti-social behavior and his penchant
for films that are highly stylized and grimly humorous that set Ozon
apart from many of the young filmmakers working in France today, he
says. "There isn't much that is experimental," Ozon says. "American
films more experimental. In France, there is a feeling that since the
New Wave not much has changed. A lot of it is the same classic or
romantic story."
Yes, independent producers in the United States have made offers to him,
he says, but he wants to master English before tackling a film outside
France. And not just any film. "Big commercial films with stars are not
what I want to do. I like to experiment, I like a small story, and I
like to work very fast," he says. "I want to make lots of films. If I
work too long on a script, I lose my desire. I'm like Leopold," Ozon
says with a hint of sly humor. "It is hard in France now because French
film is not like it was in the '70s and '80s. American movies are
everywhere."
Ozon says German audiences are surprised that a French director has
adapted and embraced Fassbinder, a filmmaker that often touched nerves
too raw for most Germans. After Water Drops on Burning Rocks
screened in Germany, Ozon says a group of Fassbinder's friends came up
to him and thanked him for it. "They told me that when Fassbinder was
younger, he was Franz. When he got older. he became Leopold. He is a
genius but it is not easy to be a genius."
There may be more of a connection between Ozon, the maverick French
director, and Fassbinder, Germany's post war cinematic conscience, than
mere eccentricity and attraction to the dark side. "My films do better
everywhere else than they do in France," says Ozon. "It was the same for
Fassbinder. He was not appreciated in Germany until he was dead. Maybe
it will be easier for me in France when I am dead."
* Read the PopcornQ review of Water Drops on Burning Rocks
|
|
|
Recent Articles
Movies
Television
