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By Dana Thomas
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Francois Ozon has made six films in the past five years, each completely different from the last. Yet his imprint is unmistakable. Eschewing the typical navel-gazing style of French auteurs, Ozon makes movies the old- fashioned way: with well-written stories and compelling femmes fatales. His last picture, the Oscar-nominated "8 Women," was a clever musical whodunit with an all-female cast including Catherine Deneuve, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Beart. His latest, "Swimming Pool," which is opening around Europe and America this summer after wowing crowds at Cannes, is an elegant English-language murder mystery set in Provence, starring Charlotte Rampling and French ingenue Ludivine Sagnier. Taken together, Ozon's movies make up a sophisticated oeuvre that recalls such legendary Hollywood directors as George Cukor and Howard Hawks. Yet Ozon has never played to the crowds. "I make films instinctively, for my own pleasure," he says. "I know it sounds selfish, but filmmaking is the best way for me to express myself."
Ozon has always taken his time. Raised on the Left Bank in Paris, where his mother was a professor of literature and his father a biologist, the young Ozon spent most of his free time catching classic Hollywood films in Latin Quarter rep houses. At 18, he enrolled in France's national film school--where he studied with one of his idols, New Wave patriarch Eric Rohmer--then spent his 20s making short films that mostly played the festival circuit. "I wasn't in a hurry," Ozon says.
His career began to gel in 1998, when he turned 30. He directed his first feature, "Sitcom," a perverse comedy about a dysfunctional French family that deftly handled suicide and sadomasochism. His second film, "Criminal Lovers," about a pair of teens who embark on a murderous rampage after watching Oliver Stone's "Natural Born Killers," sparked such public outrage that Ozon had trouble getting financing for future projects. For his third feature, "Water Drops on Burning Rocks," about a girl whose boyfriend leaves her for a 50-year-old man, Ozon cast Sagnier, then an unknown teenage actress he saw in a short film called "Acide Anime." "She burned up the screen," Ozon remembers. "There are a lot of young French actresses, but they all resemble each other. Ludivine has a strong personality and is capable of doing completely different characters each time."
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With 2000's "Under the Sand," his rich creative relationship with the British Rampling was born. It began simply enough: Ozon needed a fiftyish French-speaking actress who would appear in a bathing suit. "Charlotte was the only one," he recalls. The timing was propitious; after a long hiatus from acting, Rampling was ready to get back to work. "I wanted to be found," Rampling told NEWSWEEK. "And Francois found me." In "Under the Sand," Rampling plays a woman grieving the mysterious disappearance of her husband. Her subtle, profound performance triggered a soaring comeback. "In life you have ups and downs," she says. "Right now I'm on the crest of the wave. My meeting with Francois came when I had the strength to go back on this crest. And we were able to do the kind of work I've always wanted to do, where you use the different parts of your life like a sculptress. You mold it into something."
Ozon's work with Rampling in "Under the Sand" solidified his reputation as a "woman's director." His female characters are intelligent, sensual and complex, as well as the focal point of his stories. French cinema veteran Deneuve was so impressed by Ozon that she places him alongside the iconic Francois Truffaut. "Rarely have I --seen a director who is so involved in every part of the process," she says. Ardant compared working with Ozon to "the pleasure of drinking champagne."
After "8 Women," Ozon wanted to write something else for Rampling. So he came up with "Swimming Pool," a thriller about a dried-up English crime novelist who rediscovers her passion for living after a stint at her publisher's unoccupied house in the French countryside, where she goes to recover from writer's block. The novelist, Samantha Morton (Rampling), relishes her solitude there--until the publisher's randy teenage daughter, a buxom bleached blonde named Julie (Sagnier), arrives unannounced and moves in. Julie is an explosive presence, swimming naked in the pool, boozing and smoking pot, bringing home the village's bedraggled men for long, loud nights of lovemaking. The ever-uptight Morton reaches for the earplugs.
As the saucy Julie, 23-year-old Sagnier secures her status as France's most versatile young talent. In "8 Women," she played a perky tomboy; later this year she will appear as the devilish Tinkerbelle in P. J. Hogan's "Peter Pan." In "Swimming Pool" she's sexy, tacky and provocative--everything Julie needs to eventually unblock Morton. As in "Under the Sand," Rampling conveys her character's inner torment and frustration without saying much at all. Yet she has fun, too, gamely disrobing--it is the south of France, after all--and kindly reminding viewers why Helmut Newton's old photos of her in the buff are so memorable. (When asked how she's maintained her fine form, Rampling confesses, "Sacrifice.")
The film is Hitchcockian in tenor as well as in structure--both quirky and suspenseful--and the clash between the two women is at once revealing and hysterically funny. "One of the themes I have in my films is identity, how someone constructs their personality through sexuality," says Ozon. This point of view comes from experience; Ozon is one of the few directors today who are openly gay. "Lies," he says, "are not interesting, in artifice or in life. It's truth that touches people and causes upheaval."
Not surprisingly, his talent has caught Hollywood's attention. Agents and producers have been calling, offering him films to direct and backing for his own projects. But so far, he's turned them all down. "Why should I go to Hollywood?" he asks. "It doesn't interest me to not have the final cut and to have to battle with the producers when they try to impose their point of view. Here I do what I want and I am free." That freedom has allowed Ozon, and his actresses, to make weighty, witty movies that translate easily into any language.
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