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Ozon's Transgressive Triple: Sitcom/Criminal Lovers/Water Drops on Burning Rocks
[Blu-ray]
Blu-ray A - America - Altered Innocence Review written by and copyright: 20240811 (11th August 2024). |
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The Film
 "Kink, murder, incest, and cannibalism. These are just a few of François Ozon's favorite things in his early features. A masterful chameleon of genre and style with more than 20 years of filmmaking under his belt, Ozon has built a vast and versatile body of work and while he may have gained the spotlight after the critically acclaimed and elegantly subtle 'Under the Sand' (2000) along with the sexy thriller 'Swimming Pool' (2003), this collection rediscovers Ozon's brash roots with a trilogy like no other." Sitcom: When the patriarch of an upper-middle class household (Too Beautiful to Die's François Marthouret) brings home a lab rat he has "fallen in love with," its very appearance repulses his wife (Nathalie...'s Évelyne Dandry) but has a very strange influence on their children. At dinner in the presence of new housekeeper Maria (Who Killed Bambi?'s Lucia Sanchez) who along with her gym teacher husband Abdu (Jules-Emmanuel Eyoum Deido) – who have taken the place as dinner guests of the mother's best friend who only seems to exist on the other side of the mother's mobile phone – introverted Nicolas (Midnight in Paris' Adrien de Van) announces that he is gay. The mother panics while the father assures her it is probably just a phase while daughter Sophie (In My Skin's Marina de Van) and Maria question what would be so bad about him being gay. Abdu agrees to have a talk with Nicolas but is distracted by the rat and suddenly realizes his own bisexuality. That night, Sophie foregoes sharing her bed with visiting boyfriend David (Wild Reeds' Stéphane Rideau) to play with the rat; after which, she jumps out a second story window. Six months later, both children have changed completely. With the help of Maria taken over nursing paraplegic Sophie, clothes horse Nicolas is placing ads to have men visit him at home while Sophie assumes the dominant role in a sadomasochistic relationship with a not-entirely-willing David. With the father a detached and dispassionate observer of his own family, mother can only turn a blind eye for so long before her own encounter with the rat motivates her to go to extremes to bring her family back together. Director François Ozon's 1998 debut feature Sitcom is a somewhat Buñuel-ian spin on Pier Paolo Pasolini's Teorema, with the basic plot of a "seductive" stranger unleashing the repressed and sometimes destructive impulses of a family as much as influence on Takashi Miike with Visitor Q from 2001 as fodder for lower-budget, lower-brow contemporaries on the softcore erotica market like Friend of the Family. Ozon is less interested in the cultural and socioeconomic causes of said repression than the weirdness that ensues from sexual awakening and emotional and physical sadism to a climax featuring the biggest rat outside of Food of the Gods. The surviving characters achieve a new equilibrium not by facing taboos and rejecting them in favor of propriety but achieving a new outer illusion of propriety to contain their altered relationships – even Maria is less concerned about being married to a gay man having relationships with his students or the embarrassment of having a compromising photograph of her in circulation than the fact that Abdul has lost his job, and in the end assumes the role of a present friend of the mother's in place of her old friend whose constant drama and diseases may be another form of repression – by rejecting a character who does not so much insist on propriety but represents it not by moralizing but simply refusing to condescend to be affected in any way (expressing not superiority but an overall lack of concern or even affection for "loved ones"). Apart from a prosthetic penis and the real life de Van siblings taking a non-sexualized bath together, much of the taboo content is discreetly suggested and even subverted when a repressed character bursts in on what they assume by sound to be salacious.  Criminal Lovers: Alice (The Dreamlife of Angels' Natacha Régnier) and Luc (Slalom's Jérémie Renier) are teenagers on the run after the apparent thrill killing of classmate Saïd (Grande école's Salim Kechiouche). They recklessly wipe down the crime scene, misspend their money on supplies, are caught on camera robbing a jewelry store, and get lost in the woods after burying the body. Unable to find the car and starving, the pair board a boat and cross a stream where they come across a cabin. Like Goldilocks, they invite themselves in and help themselves to some rabbit stew only for the owner to return in the form of a mysterious woodsman (Underground's Miki Manojlovic) who forces the pair into the cave wall cellar beneath the cabin. He later hauls Luc up, forces him to eat as Alice looks on hungrily, and then bathes the younger man before chaining him to the end of his bed while he sleeps. When the woodsman tells Luc "I like my girls dry, with just muscle and skin on their bones. Whereas I prefer my boys nice and plump," Alice thinks she knows what he means after she discovers most of Saïd's body sharing the intimate space with her; but Luc is not so sure the woodsman whether actually wants to eat him. Ozon's second feature directorial effort takes things overtly in the direction of a fairy tale as a sibling-like couple – Luc cannot get an erection with Alice and she actually seems as thrilled as he is mortified about the things that do get him excited – who cut their apron strings with an act of bloody transgression seemingly as "unmotivated" as those crimes committed by children blamed on violent television but then their experience of the harsh realities of the outside world is either forestalled or poetically conveyed through through their encounter with a villain who is as much a "bear" as the witch of Hansel and Gretel fattening at least one of them up but with a different motive in mind… at least for a while. Things become more complex structurally with a series of flashbacks by both Luc and Alice that suggest the motivation for the murder of their fellow student was a mix of attraction – both Alice's and her own suspicion that Luc might be attracted to Saïd – jealousy, and particularly control and domination as Luc ponders similarities between the woodsman's force and Alice's manipulation. When Luc more figurately loses his innocence (or has it taken from him), the reactions of all three are more ambiguous than expected, as are their actions when the tables are turned; and it seems that it is only when Alice and Luc attempt to fall back upon convention that the harsh realities of the outer world come down upon them and the woodsman seems to be the only innocent (at least from Luc's perspective).  Water Drops on Burning Rocks: Fifty-year-old traveling businessman Léopold (Ridicule's Bernard Giraudeau) brings nineteen-year-old Franz (The Lines of Wellington's Malik Zidi) back to his apartment for a drink and some games. Léopold's obvious motive is seduction but Franz has a girlfriend and expresses a revulsion at attraction to men before gradually admitting to fooling around in school – being less disgusted by sexual than by a classmate's kiss – and then a fantasy he had about his stepfather that Léopold turns into a reality. When we next see them, Léopold and Franz are living a dysfunctional domestic relationship – Franz runs around the house in lederhosen while Léopold wonders what he does all day while he is away – but they both suppress their dissatisfaction with one another by living out another fantasy. When Franz's girlfriend Anna (Swimming Pool's Ludivine Sagnier) turns up on his doorstep wanting to get back together, she needles him until he admits how unhappy he is despite loving Léopold and convinces him to get back together with her. When Léopold returns home early, however, Franz sees the more controlling and domineering side of one of his lovers which is further underlined by the appearance of a ghost from Léopold's past in the glamorous Véra (Desperately Seeking Susan's Anna Thomson) and Franz's means of resistance diminish until there is only one way out. Working from an early, unproduced and previously-unfilmed stage play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Ozon's "chamber drama" of a third film Water Drops on Burning Rocks, he demonstrates that the formalist elements of the first two films were not so scattershot but evolving towards a more consistent style from the mannered compositions of the first film's interior coverage and the slick and hyper-saturated flashbacks that punctuate the second film to this film's symmetry and stylization from the still photograph exterior of post-WWII brutalist Germany to the severe lines and colors of Franz's sixties/seventies-decor apartment to which he places no special attachment even as it reflects his exacting nature. Whereas Ozon could ping-pong back and forth between storylines within a suburban home in Sitcom as if the characters were as physically-separated from one another as they were emotionally, and the protagonists of Criminal Lovers escaped and were informed into memories of the recent past, Water Drops on Burning Rocks is relentlessly confrontational within the comparatively spacious yet claustrophobic apartment as characters are unable and unwilling to leave each other alone, with Ozon and Fassbinder controlling when and where these episodes end with four act breaks. Apart from a brief violent fantasy on the part of Franz that echoes the fakeout flash-forward opening of Sitcom, characters read into each others remarks and pick at each other even in silence, and without any kind of visualized flashbacks the viewer and the characters only have what they say to each other to attack and contradict for the purpose of provocation rather than exposing the truth. Like Luc in Criminal Lovers, Franz comes to realize that he is actually stuck between two controlling personalities, with Anna seemingly more invested in having a family with him than the possibility that another man might turn his eye, and possibly as besotted with Léopold as willing to join in with him to get part of Franz rather than being a battle of wills for him in totality. Véra may be a wreck cast away by Léopold but Franz either does not have the her will or sees no point in fighting as the wreck of two such personalities, culminating in an ending as fatalistic as one would expect of Fassbinder (although perhaps surprisingly for such a young Fassbinder who probably identified with the Franz character as closer to his age). 
Video
Sitcom was picked up theatrically in the United States by New York distributor Leisure Time Features and then released on DVD in a PAL-converted transfer by New Yorker Video, although superior options were already available in France from Paramount and then M6 Video which featured English subtitles for the feature but not the extras. Altered Innocence's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen Blu-ray is likely from the same Studio Canal master as their out-of-print French Blu-ray which unfortunately did not have subtitles. Things are not encouraging at first with fuzzy opening titles including the sustained opening shot which was part of the title optical. The next shot, however, improves things dramatically with a crisp and colorful transfer that well-serves the (bare) flesh tones, skin, hair, and the too-perfect environs of the household along with some close-ups of the red-eyed rat. The end credits are also fuzzy and blooming suggesting that the opening and ending were taken from an older master or perhaps the original opticals were just so poorly done and cut into the negative rather than being limitations of the Super 16 lensing.  Criminal Lovers was picked up for U.S. theatrical release by Strand Releasing and appeared on DVD in 2001 in the expected PAL-to-NTSC conversion. As with Sitcom, Paramount's 2001 French DVD and M6's 2004 handsome slipcase reissue featured optional English subtitles for the feature but not the alternate linear cut of the film which was dropped from Studio Canal's 2020 Blu-ray as well as Altered Innocence's 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen edition under review (presumably the linear cut was created in SD and deemed unworthy of recreating in HD). The HD master is more consistently attractive without any of Sitcom's aforementioned anomalies. The woodsy scenes convey rich greens and earthy browns while the cabin and the rocky cellar offer up more rustic detail with a color scheme that contrasts with the more colorful environs of the flashbacks in which saturated colors are amped up from the red carpet on which the couple lie in one of their bedrooms to some red-gelled bits in which highlights become solarized (presumably a deliberate choice rather than a grading snafu).  Water Drops on Burning Rocks was picked up theatrically stateside by Zeitgeist Films and their DVD was disappointingly a non-anamorphic letterboxed PAL-to-NTSC transfer with burnt-in English subtitles. Again, France offered the better alternatives with a 2001 Paramount DVD and a 2004 M6 slipcase reissue with optional English subtitles (Artificial Eye's U.K. DVD was cropped to 1.75:1). Although Studio Canal's HD master probably dates from the same time as the Blu-ray releases of the other films in this set, no French edition was released so Water Drops on Burning Rocks makes its format debut here in a 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.66:1 widescreen transfer that restores the symmetrical compositions that are simultaneously spacious and cramped depending on the tone of the scene. Colors can be rich but some of the more muted tones are determined by the exacing recreation of 1970s décor and wardrobe, while close-ups in fine detail not only offer up facial imperfections that make the characters more human but also lend verisimilitude to the sets. 
Audio
Sitcom was released theatrically in Dolby Stereo but it is pretty much a mono mix with cleanly-recorded production dialogue and supportive if not dynamic effects – apart from the "giant rat" climax – and occasional scoring. Altered Innocence's DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track is true to the mix as it has appeared on DVD releases before, and the optional English subtitles are free of any noticeable errors. Criminal Lovers was released theatrically in Dolby Stereo and the mix is a bit more active than Sitcom but never a busy mix, spreading nature sounds and school noises to the surrounds along with some echo during the locker room murder, with music only really being prominent during the climax. Optional English subtitles are free of any errors. Water Drops on Burning Rocks' end credits feature Dolby Digital and DTS logos but the film was mixed in mono, so presumably it was encoded with dummy channels for theatrical compatibility while theaters still outfitted with analog Dolby Stereo decoders utilized the optical track. The DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0 track never feels insufficient in conveying the dialogue-heavy exchanges – there is little in the way of ambient noises even during a few shots of the characters seen through outside windows, enforcing the "chamber drama" aspect – while even scenes that seem fuller with music reveal the source to be diegetic by way of Léopold's record player. Optional English subtitles are free of any obvious errors. 
Extras
Extras share the third disc with Water Drops on Burning Rocks, and surprisingly that is the only film that is accompanied by a commentary track, notably the new audio commentary by film historians Cerise Howard and Rohan Spong who discuss the Fassbinder play – noting that Léopold was only thirty-five not fifty as in the film but that the age gap might have felt larger to Fassbinder who was closer to Franz's age when he wrote it – and express awe at the exacting detail of the period recreation, as well as how colors shift slightly and subtly with each act – the emotional sadism inherent in Fassbinder's work, how both directors were revolutionary in portraying in their respective decades gay couples unproblematically rather than as taboo, as well as another influence on Ozon's work in Jacques Demy. "Little Deaths: Loss and Coming of Age in François Ozon's First Chapter" (25:55) is a visual essay by film historian Kat Ellinger that looks at the director's first three films and how Ozon neither completely fits the French zeitgeists of "New French Extremity" or "New Queer Cinema" despite taboo content and subverting heteronormative ideals. She addresses the notions of lost innocence and the necessity of a death for characters to live truly – citing the influence of Georges Bataille in addition to others previously acknowledged – as well as the catalysts for characters' realizations of the fluidity of their own sexuality.  The disc also includes an interview with actor Stéphane Rideau (13:14) from 2022 in which he recalls his awareness of Ozon through his shorts, his feelings about the film's S&M content and his participation in it, shooting in a nearby suburb rather than a remote location, and particularly spending time on set with the de Van siblings and actor Marthouret. The disc also includes a compilation trailer (1:11) for the films as a set but not the individual trailers, as well as trailers for four other Altered Innocence titles from the time of their partnership with Vinegar Syndrome (which hopefully means they will be reissuing these titles themselves). 
Packaging
The discs are housed with a foldout poster featuring a reproduction of the Criminal Lovers art on one side and the essay "Transgress, Transform, Transcend" by Juan Barquin and Trae DeLellis on the reverse.
Overall
Altered Innocence's Ozon's Transgressive Triple not only conveniently packages François Ozon's first three Studio Canal-owned films but also highlights the thematic continuity of the films as well as their evolving content and style.
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