François Ozon's L'Amant double | The Double Lover (2017)

Towards the end of L'Amant double, isn't the cat seen by Chloé (Marine Vacth) just a hallucination, a trick of the mind, a dream? Didn't that cat just disappear from the flat of Rose (Myriam Boyer), but then reappear in Rose's doorway held in the arms of Paul (Jérémie Renier), like a very welcome refound present? No, that was just in one of Chloé's dreams. But then, there seem to be many dreams, many fantasies in this film where very little is quite what it seems, where the mysterious can lurk in the everyday, where everything can twist so many times.

So what is real here, how much can we grasp for certain? Chloé is psychologically disturbed and after a series of sessions with shrink Paul they fall for each other and start living together without the cat as Paul doesn't like them. Oh, and Chloé has stomach pains – doctors may think they're part of her mental sickness, but they're real all right. And the rest? Who can say?

Chloé finds that Paul has been hiding his past, has a twin brother Louis, but they have different names and Paul refuses to recognise him – as Paul is gentle and loving, Louis is mean and violent, and we discover later that in his youth Louis raped Sandra (Fanny Sage), who was a virgin, Paul's innocent girlfriend now a vegetable. But Chloé gets to meet Louis and loves his violent ways, and becomes pregnant by...which brother? But hang on, why is the mother of Sandra (Jacqueline Bisset) so angry with Chloé, and can she really read her mind?

So Chloé kills Louis, or is it Paul, or surely that's fantasy too? Then she has to be rushed to hospital and we see that Chloé's mother is also Sandra's mother: that, at least, is true in a sense as Chloé's parasitic twin which she's absorbed – all two pounds of it, so her stomach pains in the end weren't part of her illness – she chooses to call Sandra. So she wasn't pregnant after all. Doubles, mirrors, illusions, dreams. This is quite a film, one of Ozon's more complicated ones.

François Ozon's Une nouvelle amie | The New Girlfriend (2014)

There was a time when I feared that François Ozon was losing his weirdness, becoming too mainstream. He's without question lost the weirdness of his earlier films, but Une nouvelle amie is refreshingly mischievous, delving into the nature of gender, probing the mixed sexualities which we force ourselves to deny by retreating horrified into our binary sexual shells. As such, yes, it has to be said that Ozon is being transgressive here.

David (Romain Duris)'s wife Laura (Isild Le Besco) has died and left him with a baby. Laura had been the best friend of Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) since childhood, they were bloodsisters, did everything together, and now Claire is gutted. It's her duty to see that David and the baby are doing all right, and she frequently visits them. But one day she surprises David by walking in and finding him feeding the baby with a bottle and dressed in women's clothes. Of course she's shocked and even though David says it's to get the baby used to a woman's presence, she still thinks he's a pervert. And obviously she never says anything of this to her husband Gilles (Raphaël Personnaz).

But she soon gets used to the idea, even welcomes it, gives David tips on how to use make-up: he's actually been doing this for years, but of course still makes mistakes. She calls the female David Virginia, and they even go out together, have meals, shop for clothes together, as Claire and Virginia. And something odd is happening to Claire, she mentally revisits her youth, sees the lesbian opportunities of her relationship with Laura, and even gets annoyed when David comes to meet her rather than Virginia. She gets annoyed on another occasion when she's at the cinema with Virginia and the man next to Virginia – actually François Ozon himself – starts touching 'her' up! She forces them to leave, tells him he's gay, but he just says he enjoyed it because it made him feel like a woman.

The relationship continues, Claire is spending more and more time with David and the baby, she's making lies to Gilles, and of course they (very briefly) end up in bed although nothing happens because Claire springs out of bed when she realises Virginia is a man. Then tragedy seems to occur when David has an accident and is in a coma. He only recovers when Claire dresses him as Virginia.

The film ends with a flash forward seven years to the baby now a child, and the happy couple: Claire and Virginia. Rivetting.

François Ozon's Frantz (2016)

 

François Ozon's Frantz is something of a bold undertaking, something only an established director would get away with: a film not only in black and white – with the exception of a few scenes in colour evoking happy times – but also half in French, half in German. It might initially seem that Frantz is something of an exception to Ozon's previous work full of sexual ambiguity, although Ozon has always been interested in the nature of identity, in the outsider, and both main characters are seen as outsiders here.

The symmetry of the double language is echoed in several respects by the symmetry of the content: the Frenchman Adrien (Pierre Niney) is first seen in Germany then in France whereas the German woman Anna (Paula Beer) is first seen in Germany and then France; both protagonists play musical instruments and are interested in cultural matters; both Adrien and Anna experience hostility when visiting the others' countries; both speak the others' language fluently, etc.

Most of all, both have very strong emotions about Anna's dead fiancé, killed in World War I. Anna first sees Adrien placing flowers on Frantz's grave – actually not his grave as he was buried in France, but Anna and her would-be in-laws with whom she lives – Doktor Hans Hoffmeister (Ernst Stötzner) and Magda (Marie Gruber) wanted some kind of remembrance of Frantz.

Slowly, both the Hoffmeisters and Anna come to accept the presence of the previous enemy, even welcome him telling of his friendship with their loved one, and Adrien's grief is so great that the audience might easily (especially as this is an Ozon film) suspect a homosexual affair. Not Anna, who warms so much to the cultured Adrien with whom she has so much in common that – with the blessing of her would-be in-laws – she goes to France to seek him out. She has even accepted that Frantz has been killed by Adrien, although she hasn't told Hans and Magda (contrary to Adrien's bidding) anything about this.

Some detective work finds Adrien at his extremely frosty mother's, but also with Fanny, the young woman he's shortly to marry. Exit Anna very quickly, and we hear Magda announcing in a letter from Anna that she's having a wonderful time with Arien and that she doesn't know at present when she'll be returning. So what will Anna be doing? The viewer thinks of the painting in the Louvre that's been shown a few times: Manet's Le Suicidé.

The original source of Frantz is Maurice Rostand's play L'Homme que j'ai tué (1915), which was first adapted to the cinema by Ernst Lubitsch as Broken Lullaby (1932).

François Ozon's Potiche (2010)

Potiche is often called a camp, over-acted film set in the seventies and has a whiff of Douglas Sirk's melodramas, etc, and I have to accept these criticisms as they are true. But, as most reviews of the film (professional or amateur) say – that is one of its delights, and perhaps its major strength.

We have something of a starry cast with an ageing and apparently devoted Suzanne Pujol (Catherine Deneuve) as wife of Robert Pujol (Fabrice Luchini), who is her husband and the head of the Pujol-Michonneau umbrella factory, which of course reminds us of Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Jacques Demy's celebrated camp film starring Deneuve. Suzanne's dead father is the Michonneau in the title of the firm, and the ageing Pujol is messing around with who he can, but particularly his secretary Nadège (Karin Viard).

But then there comes a strike, and the greedy Maurice's heart can't take it. He can survive, but Suzanne is forced to take over, but then she has a way of dealing with people that is far superior to Maurice's. This is women taking the upper role in the 1970s, and she goes on to achieve great things, with Ozon developing from Pierre Barillet and Jean-Pierre Gredy's play of the same name, although in English I'd prefer 'Figurehead' to 'Trophy Wife'.

Maurice Babin (Gerard Depardieu) – the communist mayor who's long ago had a one-off fling with Suzanne – doesn't make it to a second helping, although Suzanne makes mincemeat of both him and her husband to become a député MP: this woman is definitely on top.

François Ozon's Dans la maison | In the House (2002)

Dans la maison is adapted from Juan Mayorga's play El chico de la última fila (2000), and is in a sense a kind of thriller, although on the surface a banal one in which French teacher Germain Germain (Fabrice Luchini, a failed author) becomes intellectually (but not sexually) attracted to his student Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), who shows signs of being gifted, someone who could become a writer. Germain lives with his wife Jeanne (Kristen Scott Thomas), who runs an art gallery, and who's a little concerned about her husband, who hasn't had sex with her for some time, not since his interest in Claude.

Germain encourages Claude, suggests new ways he can approach his writing, although the situation intensifies and Claude, who has befriended his classmate Rafa (Bastien Ughetto), becomes increasingly interested in Rafa's home, which 'smells middle class'. He records his impressions in his compositions which increase in frequency, and which Germain suggests Claude might tackle better.

But fantasy overcomes reality: how much of Rafa's parents house does Claude in fact study, as some writing here is obvious fantasy? Does Claude engage in a passionate kiss with Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner), Rafa's mother: certainly that would explain Rafa's falling out with Claude, although of course there's that other passionate kiss that Rafa plants on Claude, Claude calling Rafa a 'sale pédé' ('dirty queer'), and pure imagination certainly must be Claude writing off Rafa as hanging himself.

And then there's Germain being suspended for faking Rafa's maths test in order to continue the relationship he's vicariously living through Claude's writing, Claude leaving home and visiting Germain's flat while he's not there but Jeanne is, and does anything sexual come of that?

In the end the teacher and the student stare at the block of flats from the park and imagine, invent occurrences, and the viewer sees picture windows, in one of which is a murder, although this is obviously in their imagination....isn't it?

François Ozon's 8 Femmes | 8 Women (2002)

8 Femmes is a major film of François Ozon's, originally intended as a remake of George Cukor's The Women of 1939 until that attempt proved unsuccessful, and then a Robert Thomas 1960s play was adopted, from which Ozon very freely worked to produce a kind of melodrama, or detective story, or (in parts) a musical with a strong eye on the works of Cukor, Hitchcock, Sirk, and so on.

Furthermore, 8 Femmes is a mark of Ozon's maturity as at the age of thirty-four he has gathered such icons as Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardent, Emmanuelle Béart and Darielle Darrieux, plus Virginie Ledoyen, Ludivine and Firmine Richard to make up the eight women. Ozon was obviously happy working with women, and stated that a film called 8 Hommes would not have been possible for him.

Without going into the details of the plot of the film (which would take up a lot of space) this is not the usual entertainment fare: it's about what initially appears to be a murder of a man by any of eight women, and each woman has her secrets, any of the eight could be the murderer. So far so Agatha Christie, say, but this is no Agatha Christie mystery.

This is more like a murder mystery without a real murder plot, in fact there is only the thinnest of plots here, or rather a fake plot (McGuffin?) drives the action. Gender intrigue this is, but with relevant songs through the decades to punctuate what is happening or felt. And there is also adultery, lesbianism, violence, intimations of incest, whatever you like. This is a film set in the 1950s which delights in its transgression, and is probably one of the most complex, if not the most complex, that Ozon had done before.

François Ozon's Swimming Pool (2003)

If François Ozon's Swimming Pool had been by Shakespeare it might have been labelled a 'problem play' because it doesn't altogether cohere, but then that's probably the idea: many things in it are slightly out of sync. It stars Charlotte Rampling as the novelist Sarah Morgon with the publisher John (Charles Dance).

At the beginning, when Sarah is going to see John on the tube in London, she rebuffs an admirer of her detective Dorwell novels by telling her she's not the person she thinks she is. Throughout the film the viewer will ask him- or herself who she actually is, but no matter. Sarah is tired, so Charles suggests she relax at his place near Lacoste, Vaucluse, while she works on her novel.

This is when the film alternates between Sarah's wobbly French and the even more wobbly English of John's young daughter Julie (Ludivine Sagnier), who soon unexpectedly joins her at Charles' holiday home. You could call this a generation conflict, but Sarah doesn't take to Julie and her bringing home guys from the village to have noisy sex with, although she seems to be becoming strangely attracted to Julie, especially after the episode with Franck (Jean-Marie Lamour), who Julie starts sucking by the swimming pool, causing Sarah to jealously stop their antics by throwing a heavy object into the pool near them.

But when Sarah discovers Julie has killed Franck she helps her bury the body in the garden and swears she won't tell anyone: very strange behaviour, as if she's playing in one of her novels. And then when she returns to London and sees John's only daughter, who doesn't look at all like Julie... Could it be that most of what we've been watching is merely Sarah's novel theatricalised?

François Ozon's 5x2 (2004)

The slightly odd title relates to the form of the film, which, like arguably all of François Ozon's movies, is experimental. The movie is in five parts, each separated by a blank screen for a few seconds, but the parts are in reverse chronological order, essentially concerning two (2) married people. As with most of Ozon's films, people – particularly couples, who are hardly ever, or only briefly, couples at all – overwhelmingly don't get on with each other.

The first part begins in the solicitor's office, where the protagonists Gilles Ferron (Stéphane Freiss) and Marion (Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi) get divorced. They then go to a hotel and have sex, although this is far more like a rape. After staging an obviously fake suicide attempt while Marion is in the bathroom, Gilles pathetically asks Marion if there's any chance of reconciliation, which she replies to by leaving without a word.

The second part is an evening dinner party at Gilles and Marion's place – not long before the first part, although it's uncertain exactly when – and Gille's brother Christophe (Antoine Chappey) joins them with his younger boyfriend Mathieu (Marc Ruchmann). Here infidelity is talked about, with Mathieu speaking of its unimportance (Christophe agreeing), and Gilles speaking of an orgy he and his wife went too, in which he engaged in extramarital sex (with Marion's assent), but without her participation. After Mathieu (who is going to a party) and Christophe (who Mathieu suggests is too old for it) leave and Gilles (in contradiction to what he has said to Christophe in private) tells Marion that the gay couple's relationship won't last very long and that (although the viewer hasn't heard this) Christophe and Mathieu don't have sex.

The third part begins in a hospital corridor and Marion has given birth prematurely. It's by no means certain why Gilles goes with his mother-in-law to see the baby but doesn't see Marion herself, only phones her.

The fourth part opens with the wedding vows, the reception and the 'happy' couple going to bed but doing nothing because Gilles falls asleep while Marion is primed for sex. Marion gets dressed, avoids the reception where only her parents are dancing and Christophe is chatting up the waiter over a spliff, and meets a young American who forces himself upon her although she passionately responds eventually, to return guiltily to her new husband to tell him (while he's asleep) that she loves him.

The final part is set in Italy, where Gilles is on holiday with his former girlfriend Valérie (Géraldin Pailhas). They obviously have a number of differences and while there, he coincidentally meets Marion, someone he vaguely knows from work, and she's on holiday on her own four months after finsihing with her boyfriend. When Valérie goes off for a day on her own they meet, ask each other personal questions and go off for a swim in the sea. And so ends another Ozon film, but at the beginning.

François Ozon's Angel (2006)

Generally speaking, François Ozon's first completely English-speaking film was poorly received critically in England, but well received critically in France. Quite simply, outside of France the film world didn't understand Ozon. In a Guardian interview in 2009 with Ryan Gilbey, Ozon said 'When I make a film, I always assume the audience is clever'. That doesn't necessarily mean that the non-French-speaking world isn't clever, but that they just weren't ready for a film force that would come and hit them right where it counts: in the head. Critics didn't understand Ozon because he is not only highly film literate, but unpredictable: he uses a number of different movie genres, sometimes in the same movie.

Influenced in particular by Douglas Sirk movie melodramas of the 1950s and at the time rated B-movie material but now revised as quality stuff, Ozon gives us Angel in 2006, set in the Edwardian period and loosely based on the English writer Elizabeth Tayor's novel Angel (1957). Angel Deverill (Ramola Garai) is the precocious schoolgirl who doesn't read but writes, although her English teacher tells her she is influenced by Dickens and, er, Marie Corelli. Corelli is the obvious link here, because Angel, a working-class kid convinced that she has tremendous writing gifts, has some similarities to Corelli. Corelli was convinced of her brilliance as a writer, although she wrote mediocre books which sold in huge numbers, became very rich and settled down in Stratford-upon-Avon, where she was noted for being propelled along the river in a gondola.

Similarly, Angel sells tons of books and becomes immensely rich. But she then buys a palatial property which she furnishes in appallingly bad gaudy taste, fills with servants and pets, marries a wastrel and a philanderer and the audience – in spite of wondering how things will end, in spite of hating Angel for her newly-found class hatred – hopes he will disappear before he ruins her.

All this time though Angel has been a Sartrean model of mauvaise foi: she lives a fantasy, believes she's a great writer, thinks her husband Esmé (Michael Fassbender) is a great painter, she lies about everything. Even when Esmé hangs himself, she lies to a reporter that he loved their home 'Paradise' and died of a heart attack, until...

Until by chance she finds a letter in a book, addressed to the mistress Edmé had been keeping, lying to her that the money he was spending was on gambling debts.

This is a hugely overblown film, packed with clichés, such as the rainbow over the early lovers as they kiss, the images where they spent their honeymoon: Venice (the gondola in the foreground), Greece (the Acropolis in the background), and Egypt (the pyramids in the background). Angel details the triumph of illusion (or delusion) over reality. Until Angel sickens not only because of the death of her loved ones, but because she's lost control of her life, she rushes out of her palace in her bare feet in the snow to rescue her kitten, and finally she sees that the only person who's ever loved her is her doting female secretary Nora (Lucy Russell). And what can Nora say to her publisher Theo (Sam Neill) when he suggests she writes about Angel's life because she knew her best: 'Which life? The life she lived, or the life she dreamed?'

This film, which concerns the impossible life dividing appearance and ineluctable reality, of the lies we tell not only to others but to ourselves too, probably describes the only life we can ever have, the only life we're worth, all that hell allows.

François Ozon's Un lever de rideau (2006)

Un lever de rideau is the result of the film Angel being delayed, and is a 26-minute film adapted from Henri de Monterlant's play Un Incompris (1943). And it very much looks like a play, with just scenes in a flat, mostly just one room. Bruno (Louis Garrel) is waiting for his girlfriend Rosette (Vahina Giocante) and talking to his friend Pierre (Mattieu Amalric).

Rosette is late and Bruno has sworn that if she is more than forty-five minutes late then the relationship is over, in spite of the fact that he loves her. Pierre tries to reason with his madness, but to no avail: this is another case of supreme subjectivity – we think for instance of the man refusing to have sex with the light on in the 'Love in the Dark' section of Scènes de lit.

Rosette arrives a few minutes after Bruno's deadline with the excuse that she bought some plums on the way for him. But she is too late, in spite of them having sex shortly following her arrival. Because of Bruno's intransigence, they are in a stalemate situation, neither of them able to move. But at the same time, Bruno is obviously shattered, hurt by a situation of his own making.

François Ozon's Regarde la mer (1997)

Regarde la mer, like La Robe d'été, is set on l'Île-d'Yeu, an island in Vendée only reached by boat.* Essentially this medium length (52 minute) film with only the two central characters have speaking parts (with the exception of a few unheard calls from the husband at the end): Sasha (Sasha Hails) and Tatiana (Marina De Van). Sasha's husband is away for a short time, leaving his wife in their holiday home to look after their baby child. Soon, a female drifter – who in some ways could be said to resemble a non-dangerous version of Mona in Varda's Sans toit ni loi – arrives and Sasha's world is overturned.

Tatiana has a tent and wants to pitch it near Sasha's home, although she's hardly polite when Sasha not only agrees, but encourages Tatiana, inviting her to a meal (and at the end of which Tatiana licks her plate clean like a dog), welcoming her outside the next morning to breakfast, in which Tatiana apparently rather begrudgingly merely has a coffee, no gratitude expressed. In fact, the weirder Tatiana gets and the more objectionable she becomes the more Sasha seems to become endeared to her.

And Sasha's excitement, even transformation it might be said, deepens as the whole odd business continues: on seeing Tatiana retire to her tent, Sasha watches it as she masturbates on the edge of a chair back. The next day on the beach, Sasha asks what Tatiana is looking at, to which comes the reply 'men fucking in the wood'. As if under some strange kind of spell Sasha ventures into the wood – an obvious gay cruising area – and imitates the men by standing against a tree as if in wait. A man comes along and begins caressing her breasts, although she directs his attention to her bikini bottom and he begins licking. It's impossible to tell if this is fantasy or supposed to represent reality in the film, but then some of Ozon's films work like this.

Sasha's husband phones her to let her know that he's returning the following morning and Sasha says Tatiana can spend the night in her home. While Sasha and her child are asleep Tatiana – who's revealed that she once had an abortion – watches the sleeping couple with tear running down her face and strips naked. When Sasha's husband returns he unzips the tent to find his dead wife naked and bound up, her vulva stiched up. The last shots we see are of Tatiana on the boat to the mainland, the baby in her arms.

^* Vendée's other isand is Noirmoutier, which can be reached by road, and of course is associated with Agnès Varda, who had a home there with her husband Jacques Demy.

François Ozon's Scènes de lit (1997)

As suggested in the title, these are bed scenes, although certainly not of a voyeuristic nature – in fact there're mostly awkward, even impossible. Ozon shot this 26-minute film in a bored moment, but I wouldn't write it off as trifling. We have sex seen from different, er, angles here, but by no means in an insalubrious sense. I've no idea if the scenes here are typical or untypical – no one can know, because by definition the sex act (not that it's visible here) is unseen. These are perhaps suggestions of happenings (or most probably non-happenings) in bed. There are seven titled scenes here:

–– 'Le trou noir': a man (François Delaive) goes to a prostitute to witness her renowned feat: performing fellatio while singing La Marseilliaise.

–– 'Monsieur Propre': A couple are about to have sex when the man talks about his belief that personal hygiene is a capitalist weapon, and that he doesn't wash. Unsurprisingly, the woman leaves.

–– 'Madame': A fifty-two-year-old woman picks up a nineteen-year-old guy and they end in bed together, although the woman is unsure. The young man does his best, but they remain in bed, separate.

–– 'Tête bêche': A man and a woman lie in bed in the head to toe. She counts down from one hundred in Spanish while the man alternates the countdown in French. They become increasingly excited as they near 69, which marks the end and the beginning, presumably, of them practicing soixante-neuf.

–– 'L'Homme idéal': A woman is distraught because her lover has left her, but on playing out the role of her partner to her female friend, the two become sexually involved with one another.

–– 'Love in the Dark': A man cannot have sex with a woman because she doesn't want to turn out the light, whereas the man can't have sex with the light on. In the end, he masturbates without the woman doing anything.

–– 'Les Puceaux': Virginity, but of a different kind: one of the men hasn't had sex with a man, whereas the second hasn't had sex with a woman. Slowly, first via fellatio, the homosexual virgin begins his initiation ceremony.

We can see the extreme subjectivity, the lack of ability to concern oneself with others, in the males in 'Monsieur Propre' and 'Love in the Dark' as for example in Bruno with regard to Rosette in Ozon's adaptation of Montherlant's play Le Lever du rideau. And change of sexual identity is present here too in 'Les Puceaux' and 'Love in the Dark'.

François Ozon's Une robe d'été (1996)

Une robe été is a short of 15 minutes. Luc¹ (Frédéric Mangenot) is on holiday with his boyfriend Sébastien (Sébastien Charles), who is potentially disturbing the neighbours by singing along to the gay icon Sheila's version of 'Bang Bang', and really camping it up.² Luc is annoyed and goes for a cycle to the beach. There, he is alone and strips off naked to swim in the sea and later sunbathe, still naked, but with his belly to the sand.

A Spanish woman of about thirty (Lucia Sanchez) comes along and asks him for a light, he tells her he's seventeen, she lies and says she's the same age, then asks if he wants to go into the woods with her as she fancies sex. He tentatively agrees, says it's his first time, and after they've had sex she produces a lighter for the post-coital cigarette: yes, that's another lie she's told, but then she originally asked for a light to get talking to him. Luc admits that he's lied because he's had sex before.

On returning to the beach the naked Luc finds his clothes have been stolen, the woman lends him her dress until the next morning, when she leaves on the boat. Bidden, he kisses her as they part and he cycles off to join Sébastien, who has enthusiastic sex with him on the kitchen table.

Luc returns to the beach with the dress he's mended (Sébastien having torn it in the sex session), but the Spanish woman tells he to keep it, and they part with a passionate kiss.

There's some transgression here, questions of sexual identity: Luc, a homosexual (whatever that means) has enjoyed heterosexual activity, as Paul in Une rose entre nous hasn't disliked (as a heterosexual, whatever that means) sex with Yves. Identity, who we are or what we think we are, is constantly shifting, and can't pin us down, can't nail us to a stereotype to which we don't belong.

1. In reverse, Luc spells cul, the French for arse.

2. This scene reminds me of Stephen Caffrey dancing and camping it up to 'Dreamgirls' in  Norman René's seminal gay film Longtime Companion (1990).

François Ozon's Une Rose entre nous (1994)

A 27-minute film. Une Rose entre nous stars hairdressing assistant Paul (Rodolphe Lesage), who works with the camp Rémy (Christophe Hémon). One day Rose (Sasha Halls), a French-speaking English woman, asks for her hair to by dyed 'squirrel-red', is offended by the result and storms out of the salon shouting strong insults in English. When Paul catches up with her she arranges for them to meet outside a night club.

It's a gay nightclub, and Paul is drawn into Rose's plot for them to prostitute themselves to two older men there: Robert (Jacques Disse) and Yves (Francis Arnaud). Rose refuses to have sex with Robert, although Paul doesn't with Yves, but is very annoyed about the profit Rose made, although they go back to her place and have sex. In the morning he tells Rose he's going out to buy croissants, that he'll be back soon, but goes back to his hairdressing job, sharing his food with Rémy, feeling light spirited.

Definite transgression here, but particularly of a sexual nature.

François Ozon's La Petite Mort (1995)

François Ozon's early short (26 minutes) La Petite Mort  bears some resemblances to the slightly earlier Victor, such as the themes of the death of the father, homosexuality, and identity. But the protagonist here, Paul (François Delaive) is not an adolescent but in his twenties and living with his lover Martial (Martial Jacques), although he is still a troubled soul. He is a photographer and specialises at the time we meet him in shots of males at the moment of masturbatory orgasm: the title of the film refers to the 'little death' of orgasm as opposed to actual death.

Actual death, though, is present here. Paul's sister Camille (Camille Japy) takes him to see his dying father – from whom he's been estranged – although he flees from him when his father (the unnamed Michel Beaujard) doesn't recognise him and calls him 'monsieur'. This denial of identity is reproduced when Paul – wearing Martial's trousers – can't pay the train ticket inspector the fare and has to get off at the next station.

Paul sneaks into the hospital to photograph his father asleep, uncovers his body and takes shots of his nakedness, of his genitals, then develops the films at home. He cuts the eyes out of a like-size photo of his father's face and holds it up as a mask to look out of, the father and the son joined.

His sister – who previously ejected him from the private hospital room on seeing him take the photos – reconciles herself with him and presents him with a box of photos of Paul as a child and with his father. When he returns to Martial he is able to have sex with him again, as he was unable to before.

François Ozon's Victor (1993)

François Ozon's first short film, Photo de famille (1988), made when he was only twenty-one, contains a number of elements that would play a part in his future films. An obviously amateur seven-minute silent movie in which his parents, his brother and his sister star, this features his brother Guillaume administering a lethal dose of poison in a cup of coffee to his mother, stabbing his sister to death with a pair of scissors, and smothering his father as he lies asleep on the sofa. Guillaume then drags the dead onto the sofa and poses for a photo between them. Of course, we all have to kill our parents metaphorically, and this is a version of the process on film.

Victor is a mixture of a horror story and a comedy, a fantasy and a reality. The adolescent Victor practices his suicide by holding a gun to his mouth, is interrupted by the cry of the maid, and then we hear two shots: no, he's not missed the first time, but he's killed his parents and can't seem to do the same to himself.

The maid discovers his deed and starts wearing his mother's dress, then invites her boyfriend in, they have passionate sex (slyly witnessed by Victor), they steal the family jewels – which Victor helps them with – and they initiate him into a kind of sexual threesome. (There are a number of brief but obviously homoerotic sequences.) Victor masturbates in the garden near a naked statue although his sperm is unconvincing, he waves farewell to the maid and boyfriend as they drive off in the parents' car, he buries the bodies in the garden, asks the aged gardener (vaguely) about his problem, but the gardener has nothing to do with what happens in the house. We last see Victor taking an RER train somewhere.

Paris 2017: Cimetière de Passy: Rosemonde Gérard

Rosemonde Gérard (1866–1953) was the wife of the writer Edmond Rostand (1868–1918), whose grave in Marseille I showed here. She too was an acclaimed writer, notably for her poetical works – Les Pipeaux (1889) and L’Arc-en-Ciel (1926).

Edmond and Rosemonde's son Maurice Rostand (1891–1968), poet and novelist, is also buried here. His mémoire Confession d'un demi-siècle (1948) is one of his most well-known works, and his L'Homme que j'ai tué (1925) was adapted to cinema by Ernst Lubitsch as Broken Lullaby (1932) and by François Ozon as Frantz (2016).