Dubbed by Dazed as “France’s most unpredictable filmmaker,” film distributor Altered Innocence brings filmmaker François Ozon’s early narrative features to home video with their new Blu-ray and DVD release of Ozon's Transgressive Triple: Sitcom, Criminal Lovers, and Water Drops on Burning Rocks.
Having directed over twenty feature films in less than thirty years, Ozon’s work defies genre labels, whether between films or within the same movie. This unofficial trilogy – Sitcom, Criminal Lovers, and Water Drops on Burning Rocks – plays with time, sexual taboos, dreams, and age with elements of melodrama, eroticism, and pitch-black comedy.
While he flits between genres and rises above any of the audience’s expectations with confidence, Ozon’s camera often frames his characters within cages and mirrors, representing the repression and literally reflecting the duality of human sexuality. Bold, sensual, wild, and disturbing, Ozon’s Transgressive Triple belongs in any LGBTQ+, foreign language, or arthouse film collection.
The first of the trilogy, 1998’s Sitcom, opens on a surprise birthday party gone terribly wrong. The camera shows only the ivy-covered walls of a brick mansion house and the sound design tells us all we need to know - a chorus of “Happy Birthday” sung to a father, interrupted by the sound of someone loading a gun. “But why, Jean?” Gunshots. We wonder the same thing: but why? Sitcom flashes back to several months earlier to answer this question, taking the audience on an upsetting descent down one family’s depraved rabbit hole. (Or in this case, a rat hole?)
Helen (Évelyne Dandry, credited simply as “La mère”) lives in an inherited estate with her two young adult children, Sophie (Marina de Van) and Nicholas (Adrien de Van), when, upon the simultaneous arrival of a new maid, Maria (Lucia Sanchez), and a lab rat - care of the family patriarch, Jean (Jean-François Marthouret, similarly credited as “Le père”) – Nicholas comes out as gay during a family dinner. Maria’s husband, Abdu (Jules-Emmanuel Eyoum Deido), under the guise of comforting Nicholas, instead seduces him. Later that same night, Sophie rejects her boyfriend’s (Stéphane Rideau) advances, writhes suggestively underneath the lab rat, and jumps out a second-story window.
Flash forward months later and the family seems to have gone fully unhinged: Nicholas organizes orgiastic group gambling sessions in his bedroom. Sophie becomes a paraplegic from her suicide attempt and plays sadomasochistic games with her boyfriend but neither finds much pleasure in it. Maria gets handsy (so to speak) with Sophie’s boyfriend, while her husband plays roulette in his underwear in Nicholas’ room. The catalyst of the family’s psychosexual implosion is initially unclear – have their lives always been this disturbed? Or did the arrival of Maria, the lab rat, or Abdu have anything to do with this spiral?
Twice in Sitcom the cage of the lab rat frames members of the family in breathtaking shots – once before Nicholas comes out of the closet, and once before Helen goes to great lengths to “cure” her son of his homosexuality - a visual metaphor for the characters imprisoned by familial and societal expectations. However, some cages are better left gilded and intact. “I don’t think incest will solve the problems of Western civilization,” Jean says when confronted with his wife’s indiscretion. But will a four-day, family therapy session?
Sitcom is a frisky and beyond-Freudian comedy and, if it were a sitcom, this particular episode would be titled, “The One With the Rat.” (The film’s third act also features what could be considered a loving homage to the giant lobster in John Waters’ Multiple Maniacs.)
The next film of Ozon’s, Criminal Lovers (1999), won the Grand Jury Award at the 1999 L.A. Outfest, as well as Best Screenplay at the same year’s Sitges Film Festival. The movie introduces us to the title's antiheroes during a practical joke that exemplifies the teenage lovers’ temperaments: the joke leaves the manipulative Alice (Natacha Régnier) in a fit of giggles while upsetting the reserved Luc (a tender performance from Jérémie Renier). Once they calm down, Alice meets up for a tryst with their classmate, Said, in a gym locker room while her boyfriend waits outside... Until the time comes for Luc to stab Said to death. The couple showers their victim’s blood off together. “Do you love me?” Alice asks to no reply before they shove Said’s body into the trunk of their car and drive into the night.
Criminal Lovers starts off as a fairly predictable, Y2K version of a young lovers-turned-killers story, a la Badlands and Bonnie and Clyde. The basic motive for Said’s murder remains unspoken at first, lending their violent crime an aura of mystery. But when Luc and Alice break into the home of a nameless woodsman (Predrag 'Miki' Manojlovic) - who locks his unwelcome visitors in the cellar alongside Said’s body and offers only Luc freedom at a price - the film takes a hard turn into a homoerotic Hansel and Gretel. (Talk about a fractured fairy tale!) When the woodsman reads the imprisoned Alice’s diary, the audience sees (through flashbacks) what internalized fears and twisted neuroses really inspired the lovers to commit murder.
While arguably the tamest entry in this Ozon triple feature, Water Drops on Burning Rocks (2000) is also the most cynical, despite an impromptu dance number in the final act. A chamber piece told in four acts that – like the other two films – follows a young man as he experiences a sexual awakening with an older man, Ozon’s adaptation of a play by Rainer Werner Fassbinder won the Teddy Award for Best Feature Film at the Berlin Film Festival.
20-year-old Franz (Malik Zidi, nominated for Most Promising Actor at the César Awards) goes home with the charming and cruel Léopold (Bernard Giraudeau), where they talk about love, sex, dreams, interior design… A prime example of “opposites attract,” Franz “gets off on life,” while the older Léo admits to seldom feeling happy. The pair make love, recreating a recurring dream of Franz’s. Throughout the film, this roleplay will repeat itself and its players will reverse their roles until a rather bitter end.
Within the film’s brisk four acts, Franz leaves his high school sweetheart, Anna, and moves in with Léo, who travels during the week for work. When he is home, the couple bickers like an old married couple, their relationship turning toxic and ugly as they argue over trivialities. But their incompatibility shouldn’t come as much of a surprise: they told each other in the first act as much. Franz threatens to leave and calls up Anna in an attempt to rekindle their relationship. What he doesn’t account for is Léo’s effortlessly seductive effect on members of any sex. And when Léo’s former long-term lover, Vera, makes her entrance in the fourth act, Franz realizes the truth about the man he loves.
The small cast’ undeniable chemistry and Ozon’s artful framing carry the picture, as the film’s insufferable, central relationship seems to lack any redeeming value outside of the bedroom. Léo is a cruel, magnetic man – as he likes to remind his lovers, “you need me” and not vice versa. It seems to work for him, even as those who love him lose their minds. Water Drops on Burning Rocks tells the story of a young man sharing and trusting someone with his fantasy until he realizes it’s no longer his at all.
In addition to these three rebellious entries in Ozon’s sprawling filmography, Altered Innocence’s release of Ozon’s Transgressive Triple includes a visual essay from film critic Kat Ellinger - Little Deaths: Loss and Coming of Age in François Ozon’s First Chapter - as well as interview with Sitcom actor Stéphane Rideau and a commentary for Water Drops on Burning Rocks by Cerise Howard (Program Director of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival) and Rohan Spong (Australian documentary film director). In François Ozon’s early films, the stereotypes of arthouse cinema (overlong, colorless and dull) are nowhere to be found. This transgressive triple feature from one of Europe’s modern auteurs earns its title – very few taboos are left unbroken – and belongs in any film collection that specializes in French or LGBTQ+ cinema.
What type of library programming could use Ozon's Transgressive Triple: Sitcom, Criminal Lovers, and Water Drops on Burning Rocks?
Ozon's Transgressive Triple would make for scintillating library film club screenings, especially for foreign and arthouse film fans, though the material is explicit and only for mature audiences.
What kind of film series would Ozon's Transgressive Triple fit in?
Ozon's Transgressive Triple would easily fit into an Ozon retrospective or a screening series highlighting works of transgressive cinema, alongside the likes of Gregg Araki, Todd Solondz, and the Pope of Trash himself, John Waters.
What kind of film collection would this title be suitable for?
Ozon's Transgressive Triple: Sitcom, Criminal Lovers, and Water Drops on Burning Rocks is suitable for any film collection catering to adults, but specifically, collections that prioritize foreign films, arthouse films, and LGBTQ+ voices in film.
How much does this title cost to purchase?
The 2-disc DVD is priced at $34.95, and the 2-disc Blu-ray is priced at $39.95.
Click here to learn more about Ozon's Transgressive Triple
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