Time to Leave

Toronto International Film Festival Program Guide
2005

Le Temps qui reste | Time to Leave
François Ozon
FRANCE, 2005
French | 90 minutes | Colour/35mm
Production Company: Fidélité Productions/France 2 Cinema
Executive Producer: Olivier Delbosc, Mare Missonnier
Producer: Olivier Delbosc, Marc Missonnier
Screenplay: François Ozon
Cinematographer: Jeanne Lapoirie
Editor: Monica Coleman
Production Designer: Katia Wyszkop
Sound: Brigitte Taillandier, Aymeric Devoldere, Gwennolé Le Borgne, Jean-Pierre Laforce
Music: Arvo Parth, Valentin Silvestrov, Mare-Antoine Charpentier
Principal Cast: Jeanne Moreau, Melvil Foupaud, Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi, Daniel Duval, Marie Riviére, Christian Sengewald
Production: Fidélité Productions,

Le Temps qui reste is the second work in a trilogy about death and mourning created by François Ozon, one of France’s most talented filmmakers. The first, Sous le sable, featured Charlotte Rampling as a widow unable to accept the drowning death of her husband. The film decisively showed that Ozon, primarily a maker of teasing social comedy up to that point, had an even fuller command of cinema than was first thought. It also exhibited a mature, fiercely contemporary approach to death that never drifted into melodrama or easy levity.

In this second film, a handsome, successful fashion photographer (Melvil Poupaud, strong in a role any young actor would covet) passes out during a gruelling shoot. When doctors come to deliver the bad news, his first instinct as a gay man is to assume he has AIDS. In fact he has a fully metastasized, untreatable cancer that will soon kill him. Hiding his diagnosis, he proceeds to alienate his family—in a cruelly funny sequence—then to go home and dump his young boyfriend (Christian Sengewald) immediately after they have sex. This guy, you’re thinking, is a real jerk. An odd, touching moment with a waitress in a roadside café, however, makes you reconsider his motives. And then we come to the astonishing, perfectly conceived centrepiece of the film: a short stay with his grandmother (Jeanne Moreau, who has rarely been better), where his vulnerability is met with a big heart and sound advice. He has saved his confessions for her because, as he points out, she will also die soon.

The film hits a second grace note as he reconnects with the waitress, Jany (played by the wonderful Valéria Bruni-Tedeschi), and strikes an unusual bargain that provides a happy, playful dimension to the proceedings. A master of emotional control, Ozon keeps the mood surprisingly light and breezy between the moments of sadness. While Le Temps qui reste could be read as a satire of selfishness in gay men, as well as their complicated connection to the idea of the modern family, Ozon is after something much more direct: a brutally honest evaluation of how a young man goes about dying. He succeeds with quiet authority.
—Noah Cowan