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Time to Leave (Le Temps qui Reste)
Directed by François Ozon
Starring Melvil Poupaud, Louise-Anne Hippeau, Christian Sengewald, Jeanne Moreau, Valeria Bruni Tedeschi, Walter Pagano
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Time to Leave (Le Temps qui Reste), François Ozon's newest film, is his most contemplative and elegantly simple. Not a great deal happens here-- Romain (Melvil Poupaud)-- a successful, thirtyish gay fashion photo-grapher-- is diagnosed with cancer and told that, even with a harsh regimen, he has little time to live. Facing imminent death, Romain evaluates his life and his relationships.

The bulk of the film is simply a chronicle of decisions he makes. In scene after scene-- none particularly dramatic-- he yells at his sister Sophie (Louise-Anne Hippeau) about her marriage and her kids; he breaks up with his younger lover Sasha (Christian Sengewald), with whom he seems only passingly involved; he visits his beloved grandmother Laura (Jeanne Moreau), and they discuss their impending passings; and, perhaps most surprising of all, he forms a singular relationship with a young couple-- Jany (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi) and Bruno (Walter Pagano)-- whom he befriends after he meets Jany waitressing in a cafe.

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y the end of the film, Romaine is a few weeks older and closer to a death he now seems to accept more fully.

Ozon has had an amazing career. At 38, he's become one of the noted auteur directors of contemporary French cinema, actively resisting all attempts at classification.

He first came to attention in the US in the mid-1990s with some short films-- A Summer Dress and See the Sea-- that had vaguely gay content. Then he produced a minor stir in 1999 with Criminal Lovers (Les Amants Criminels), a modern fairy tale that crossed Hansel and Gretel with Rebel Without a Cause, then added doses of Marquis de Sade before turning into a homoerotic love story.

Criminal Lovers was quickly followed in 2000 by a moderately successful adaptation of a Rainer Werner Fassbinder play, Water Drops on Burning Rocks (Gouttes d'Eau sur Pierres Brûlantes), and then later that year by the stunning Under the Sand (Sous le Sable), which cast Charlotte Rampling as a woman who could not accept the sudden, accidental death of her husband. Under the Sand was such a knockout-- audiences were simply not prepared for its depth and emotional power-- that when he released the campy, musical murder mystery 8 Women (8 Femmes) a year later, it became clear that Ozon could do just about anything-- and would.

Ozon could now command the attention of actors and the industry as well-- 8 Women starred Danielle Darrieux, Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen, and Ludivine Sagnier: an amazing cast for a 33-year old filmmaker. In 2003, he released his first English film, Swimming Pool, a psychological murder-mystery, again with Rampling. A year later, he directed 5x2, a painful tale of a marriage falling apart, but told in reverse.

Tough luck

Although Ozon is openly gay, Time to Leave is his first full-length film to feature a gay character: as homoerotic as Criminal Lovers is, it's unclear if its protagonist is actually gay or just an ogre, and the gay content in Water Drops on Burning Rocks is minimal. But Time to Leave is completely unconcerned with Romaine's sexuality. (Indeed, the outright female-- and feminist-- campiness of 8 Women makes it a far gayer film.) Sure, Romaine makes certain choices because he's a gay man, but Ozon is interested in something much more complicated and delicate here than sexual orientation.

What Time to Leave examines (as with Under the Sand, though more obliquely) is not fear of death, but rather the unavoidability in life of often equally frightening prospects. Romaine's journey to death-- unlike Charlotte's Rampling's manic flight from it in Under the Sand-- is portrayed as a peaceful and logical extension of his life. Ozon's mastery of emotional nuance here is perfectly matched by his sense of the ordinary. In retrospect, this latter sense has always been the psychological heart of his films: it's what makes the world of Under the Sand so terrifying, and gives 8 Women its profoundly camp sensibility. In Muriel Spark's 1962 novel The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie the character of Sandy grows up to write a book on psychology titled The Transfiguration of the Commonplace, which we are lead to believe is a brilliant, mystical, analysis of the mundane and deadly vagaries of everyday life. Ozon's strength as writer and filmmaker is realized in his matter-of-factness, his ability to observe without comment. With this light touch, he transfigures the everyday.

Here lies Ozon's queerness. As Romaine moves toward death in Time to Leave, he consciously makes decisions that separate him from what people expected of him in life: to be part of a biological family, to have a lover, to be a gay man without children, and-- most important-- to fight death.

This careful elucidation of one man's journey to the end is life-affirming, not from celebrating his life and choices, but because it celebrates rejecting cultural expectations.

Author Profile:  Michael Bronski
	Michael Bronski is the author of Culture Clash: The Making of Gay Sensibility and The Pleasure Principle: Sex, Backlash, and the Struggle for Gay Freedom. He writes frequently on sex, books, movies, and culture, and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
	Email:	mabronski@aol.com