Genre-bender: François Ozon on comic thriller The New Girlfriend

François Ozon's new film, The New Girlfriend, is another of the French provocateurs playful studies of genre and gender. We find out what makes this mischievous filmmaker tick

Feature by Jamie Dunn | 07 May 2015

“I’m the perv,” says François Ozon, who's sitting in a London hotel wearing a grey shirt, a pink scarf and an impish smile. Those who know the French filmmaker’s work might be thinking to themselves, “Tell us something we don’t already know!” From his saucy debut Sitcom, a Buñuelian satire in which a bourgeois family embrace their inner sexual deviance, to last year’s Young & Beautiful, an enigmatic study of a teenage call girl, Ozon has been making some of the most playfully provocative films in modern cinema. Even at his most mainstream he’s raising eyebrows: in his biggest hit to date, the candy-coloured musical 8 Women, he convinced two beloved French icons, Catherine Deneuve and Fanny Ardant, to make out on a rug in front of a roaring log fire.

The enfant terrible, still fresh-faced at 47, isn’t discussing his reputation as a director, however. He’s referring to his cameo in his new film, The New Girlfriend, in which he plays a cinema patron with wandering hands, who touches up David (Romain Duris), a recent widower who’s test driving his female alter-ego, Virginia, during a trip to the pictures. Ozon, having never appeared on screen himself, wasn’t sure he could pull the scene off, so he shot it twice: once with himself, and once with a professional actor in the role. Watching the two versions back-to-back, the performance to go with was clear. “My editor said, ‘Romain is much better when he’s acting with you.’ And I realised it was true, so we kept my take. I asked Romain, ‘Why were you better with me?’ and he said, ‘Because you were really going for it – the other actor was afraid to really touch me.’ So I was a good actor,” he says with a sly chuckle.

This cheeky director’s cameo is just the first of many nods in the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. Based on a creepy Ruth Rendell story, The New Girlfriend has the superficial appearance of a thriller, with its chilling score and gliding camerawork. We follow Claire (Anaïs Demoustier) as she discovers David, the husband of her deceased best friend, has taken to dressing up in his dead wife’s clothes. Initially it appears David’s cross-dressing is a way of bringing his wife back to life, although his deft matching of accessories and the graceful way in which he moves on heels suggests this isn’t his first time in garters. Whatever the reason, Claire is enlivened by having her BFF resurrected.

“I love the idea in Vertigo of trying to bring back to life an old love, a ghost – and that's really the idea here,” he says, referring to Hitchcock's 1958 masterpiece. In this case, however, gender is reversed: “In a certain way, Claire is a kind of Scottie [Jimmy Stewart’s character], and Romain Duris is Madeleine [Kim Novak’s character].” Given that Claire is the one pulling the strings, it’s with her the director most identifies. “Claire's playing with her doll. She’s the one helping the actor to become an actress. As a director, that’s my job: to transform Romain Duris into an actress.”

Despite Duris’s slight frame and pretty features, this was no mean feat. “The idea in the film was not to make Romain the perfect woman. He’s not and never going to be a perfect woman; he’s what he is.” What did appeal to Ozon about Duris – still best know for his blistering turn in Jacques Audiard's The Beat That My Heart Skipped – is the liveliness he brought to the role. “He was like a child, you know, like when you play with your sister. It was like a game, and that’s what I wanted from the film: I wanted something light. I didn’t want something too dramatic. I wanted someone who could have fun with the scenes between Virginia and Claire.”

In fact, Duris felt more comfortable performing as his character’s female side. “It was more complicated for him to play David than Virginia, because Virginia, she can be ridiculous, she’s over the top, so it’s easier to play this kind of character because you have the costumes, you have the wig, you have all these things,” Ozon explains. “But very often Romain would say to me ‘Who is David? What do I do?’” The secret to unlocking the character, Ozon explains, was to realise this was a film about freedom: “The freedom to become yourself, to find your own identity and maybe to escape the gender that society and your family want you to be.”

This is typical Ozon: in his movies gender and sexual desire are rarely fixed. Films like Criminal Lovers, Time to Leave and The Refuge concern characters who don’t confine their sexual partners to one gender. As a director, Ozon slips from genre to genre with a similar fluidity. To guess what he might tackle next on his circuitous filmmaking path is like throwing a dice. He’s given most genres a try: thrillers (Swimming Pool, In the House), tragic dramas (Under the Sand, 5x2), camp melodramas (Potiche, 8 Women), comic chamber pieces (Water Drops on Burning Rocks). Jean Renoir, the godfather of French cinema, once said: “a director makes only one film in his life. Then he breaks it up and makes it again.” Ozon clearly doesn’t subscribe to this thesis.


“Just call this a trans-genre movie” – François Ozon


“I’m open to many things,” says the writer-director. “I’m not sure that I would be able to make a western or a science fiction movie, but I like to play with genres.” Even while watching his films, Ozon’s genre is hard to pin down. His dramas easily slip into comedy while his candyfloss confections come wrapped in barbed wire. The New Girlfriend may be based on a Ruth Rendell potboiler, but Ozon seamlessly skips between tragedy and farce, erotic thriller and sex comedy. “Just call this a trans-genre movie,” he chuckles.

The filmmaker he most identifies with in this regard, he says, is New German Cinema firecracker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. “As a director Fassbinder said, ‘I’m building a house or castle, I don’t know which. Each film is a room and we’ll see at the end what it will be.’ I feel closer to this idea of cinema. When the film is done I turn the page very quickly. I’ve forgotten all what I’ve done.”

So if you came across one of your films on TV you wouldn’t take a look?

“No, I don’t look back, and I’m not very interested; when it’s done, it’s done. I’m sure if I watched one of my films again I’d be very depressed, I will see all the mistakes”

Do you have a favourite of the films you’ve made, at least?

“No, my favourite is the next one,” he says with a laugh.

That’s another aspect of his filmmaking he shares with Fassbinder: his stamina. Despite dying at 37, the German auteur amassed over 30 features. In the 16 years since Ozon’s 1998 debut, he’s clocked up a very respectable 15. “I make just one film a year – for me it’s my rhythm,” he says. “I have many friends who are directors and for them they are suffering each time they make a film. For me, of course it’s difficult, but there is a lot of pleasure too.”

Does he ever worry that he’ll lose this ardour? “I must say that I have no problem with inspiration,” he replies without missing a beat. “Mine is more a problem of desire, to fix myself on the right story – that’s my problem. But if I had the opportunity, the freedom, to make two films a year I would love to, because I love the shooting, I love the editing…” There’s a pause. “I don’t love the writing process,” he says thoughtfully, “but we all need to go through that.”

We’re glad he does, as there’s a strength to the depth. May Ozon’s annual contribution to the world of cinema continue unabated.

The New Girlfriend is release 22 May by Metrodome