François Ozon is a wickedly funny, smart and clever French filmmaker able to blend the line between seriousness and humour expertly. Here he crafts a novel situation that Agatha Christie herself would be proud of; can you profit off a crime you didn’t commit? And what happens when the real perpetrator of the crime shows up and is jealous of the fame earnt from her crime? It constantly spirals with a touch of humour and deft execution never shying away from the seriousness when it needs to – Ozon; ever the prolific director – is able to balance the needs between craft and circumstance expertly.
Everything Went Fine, Summer of 85 prove the Ozon can do seriousness as well as comedy – and his queer remake of Petra van Kant, Peter von Kant, shows he has his finger on the pulse of what makes Ozon work as a filmmaker. Adapted from a 1934 French Stage comedy by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil, Ozon has the tall order of casting performances that follow Carole Lombard and Betty Hutton. Here we follow Nadia Tereskiewicz, as an aspiring star actor, unable to make it big, living in a flat where she’s behind on her rent with equally aspiring lawyer Pauline (Rebecca Marder); and equally as queer as the characters in Peter von Kant. Pauline hatches a plan to make Nadia’s name when she comes home from an encounter with a rich movie producer; claiming that he’s dead, but it was a self-defence killing of a disgusting rapist. The jury is all male as are the prosecutors – and the odds are stacked against them. It is France, 1935 after all.
The confidence that Ozon can display in The Crime His Mine feels like it has a point to prove about the current state of Hollywood and the #MeToo Movement as much as is it does 1930s France. It’s let down by its need to be French – and it is very French, See How They Run tackled similar themes with a faux Agatha Christie setting a few years ago and was ostentatiously very English, a twee of Midsummer Murders about it. This feels like the French counterpart; what people would naturally assume a French film to be about. It revels in its charm, the nature of its chemistry between its leads, Tereskiewicz and Marder, and the meta narrative of casting Isabelle Hubbert as a veteran French actor. The period romp feels appropriately lavish and appropriately chameleonic, able to switch tones between seriousness and comedic affairs expertly – such is the nature of Ozon’s whimsical approach.
It may not be risk-taking but The Crime is Mine feels like an adoration of the pre-war jazz age; Ozon playing in his sandbox with the comfort zone of a remarkably skilled director; the French Steven Soderbergh. Its feminist approach doesn’t quite feel as revolutionary as it should; I’d love to see what say, Coralie Fargeat could have done with this script, having shown a bolder, more provocative and daring take in The Substance that covers similar themes. It almost feels a touch screwball, Ozon demonstrating his love of old Hollywood and allowing Manuel Dacosse to bring a rich degree of colour to a byegone era.
