UNa Foresti Ombrosa, a mushroom fricassea That they were caught by loving hands, a grandmother who divides himself between the vegetable garden, the church and the cuisine. “Under the leaves It’s not a sexy movie »summarizes François Ozonprolific French director, who is the author, as well as films whose sex appeal nobody dreams of doubting (Swimming pool, young and beautifulto name two).
However, since “there are no recipes at the cinema”, Under the leavesautumn film (also in the sense of the season of life), At home – where he detached 700 thousand tickets, after winning two prizes at the San Sebastián Festival – It went better than a teen movie.
With Under the leavesOzon, original director to the point of a spoiler spoilers (finally! If you do not find in the interview, it is only for the chronicler’s scruple), complies with the all French trend to abandon the streets and squares of the capital to go to the province and realize, citing Mondi: «A fairy tale for adults who breathe the scent of the earth after the rain and the musk of the woods, which creates the dead leaves and the cortex of the trees, which It tells the autumn beauty with its colors, its light and its sounds. A sensuality of the season that suggests a sort of return to the origins, where the moral judgments that clutter the mind, they no longer find a place ».
Hélène Vincent and Garlan Erlos in “Sotto Le leaves” by François Ozon.
We meet Michelle (Hélène Vincent, 81 years old), the protagonist of Under the leaves as he prepares a succulent contour of mushrooms that she herself caught with the‘Friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko, 74). And from Novel by a baro1936 Sasha Guitry’s film, we know that when in a French film something terrible steps to happen come on the scene.
“In Guitry’s film they all die poisoned,” explains François Ozon. «I go only to the gastric lavender for Ludivine Report (who plays Michelle’s daughter, visiting together with the eleven year old son, to the mother’s house, in Burgundy, editor’s note). But also In my family they all survived the fungi -based dinner prepared by an aunt when I was a child: Since then, it is that I cultivate the idea of telling the story of an adorable old woman who prepares cakes and sauces, and who perhaps tries to exterminate his family ».
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qmVegwzgsrc
The freedom of the viewer
Do you eat mushrooms?
I love mushrooms, I often eat them, perhaps because I was not at that dinner. My parents told me about the story.
She says “maybe she wanted to exterminate”. He never reveals the intentions of his characters. Leave to us spectators the task of interpreting them.
Sow clues. Michelle does not have glasses when it takes mushrooms …
Hélène Vincent and Josiane Balasko in “Sotto Le leaves” by François Ozon.
And it makes sure that we detest the daughter, until we wish us that he comes out of the scene and stops tormenting that poor woman of his mother.
Ludivine who played the role of his daughter with a lot of courage, when I proposed it to him, he said to me: “This woman is not the most pleasant person in the world, but I trust you”. He was very good at making us understand his reasons, in the end we understand why he behaves like this with his mother.
Georges Simenon’s legacy
Why do you leave so much freedom to the viewer?
Because I think you are smart. And because I think that everything is not known in life. And sometimes he is judged in a certain way and then realized, perhaps years later, that he had judged themselves badly, that elements were missing that they would allow to understand, as sometimes happens with judicial errors.
He also tells us that a person’s happiness can be built on the unhappiness or annihilation of another. A strong idea.
Reality is very often the case. A crime was perhaps committed in my story, maybe not. Or rather I know exactly what happened, but you don’t. I have to decide yourself, I don’t help you. Indeed, I give you another clue. I think mine is a film about the unconscious: we often dream, we want certain things to happen, even atrocious. Then, in reality, sometimes those things happen exactly as we dreamed of them. The daughter is a weight for the mother, the relationship is toxic, the mother tries to be good with her, but the situation does not improve and suddenly fate offers the solution. A balance is restored.
Ludivine Sagnier in “Sotto Le leaves” by François Ozon.
Georges Simenon wouldn’t have said it better.
Simenon was very good at creating atmospheres, and unique in describing the life of the provincial towns where you have the feeling that everything is perfect, but strange, sometimes terrible things happen behind the closed windows. The police plot is not what he cares (and I would even say to me), they interest him relationships between people, psychology, complexity and darkness that is in the human soul.
A family of election
Simenon, like many other noir authors, wonders even if there is justice at the end of the course. Is there for her?
What do you think? When I wrote the script I made him read to a famous French policeman: “Tell me how realistic” I asked him. Concluded that the detective (played by Sophie Guillemin, editor’s note) It is fantastic. Simply because there is no policeman like her all over the world. He has no evidence, but he could work on it and perhaps he would find them. But makes another decision.
There is not even a family of election like the one you propose.
I wanted to show that sometimes the selected ties are more important than the blood ones. And it is true for these two women who have a past in common, a past they cannot free themselves, and therefore are like sisters. And then I wanted to make a film about two elderly actresses, I wanted them to be at the center of the scene because the French cinema condemned them to invisibility. When I imagined Michelle in church while listening to the sermon on Maria Maddalena I had in mind, Pleasure, Max Ophüls’ movie. In particular the episode The Maison Tellieron the estate of a brothel that is one day invited, with colleagues, to the first communion of a grandson. They are all found in the countryside, a idyllic and silent place. There a sort of mystical aura combines prostitutes and young communications.
Hélène Vincent in the kitchen.
Since 1998 she has made a film a year, and they have often been a successful commercial films (8 women and a mystery, in the sand). Don’t you feel authorized to aspire to a bigger success, Hollywood?
(Snorts, French, with a shrug) and then make the choice of prostitution myself? I had some proposals, but in France I can still follow my instinct, I have the “Final Cut” (the definitive version of the film, which in America is, except a few cases, reserved for the manufacturer, not to the author, editor’s note), I don’t aspire to large budgets, I don’t want to do blockbuster. I don’t think I would be respected in America.
François Ozon: “Hollywood is not for me”
In America, perhaps today he could not have made a film, like this, in which good and evil are nuanced concepts.
In America I could not leave margins of ambiguity, everything should have been clear, explained, nothing left out of the field. And I think the off -field is very important. It is important to have actors who are not afraid of ambiguity. Hélène Vincent, when I told her the character, said to me: “It is practically the story of my life, I also lived in Burgundy and then you know, with my son …”. «Wow! Hélène, have you killed someone? ” I asked her. But she swore me no.
The sense of guilt is not for everyone. In your imagination of what nature is: religious or psychoanalytic?
In this film it was important to me to show that there are people capable of freeing themselves from the sense of guilt. Michelle does not feel guilty, she is pragmatic, she learned to come to terms with morality, it is said: “Life is so, I did what I could”. Marie-Claude, on the other hand, is pervaded of guilt, wonders if it was a bad mother and suffers from the evil that she might have made to her son. If you read stories about criminal women, you realize that for some of them the sense of guilt does not exist. Not unlike men, but for women it is more surprising because we culiar in the idea, probably false, that women are more sensitive and more empathetic.
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