When François Ozon reins in his default setting of extravagant camp, he creates some of his most satisfying dramas. This spry little French-language picture, which delights in subverting our expectations and leaves us with teasing questions about culpability and a crime, shows the director at his most understated, the better to foreground the excellent, intriguingly layered performance from Hélène Vincent.
She plays Michelle, a chic grandmother who has retired to a village in rural Burgundy near her best friend, Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko). It’s a blissful, bucolic life until an estrangement from her hostile daughter (Ludivine Sagnier) robs Michelle of the one thing she looks forward to most: contact with her grandson. A friendship with Marie-Claude’s ex-con adult son Vincent (Pierre Lottin) brings new purpose to her life, but is the relationship all it seems? For that matter, is Michelle?
In UK and Irish cinemas
