The New Girlfriend

This movie by François Ozon is what no American movie about the topic of transsexuality will ever be: a nuanced and smart look into the infinite subtlety and fluidity of human sexuality.
Here in the US, people are busy policing pronouns and creating labels, categories and sub-categories of sexual orientation. This insistence on putting people in monolithically labeled sexuality boxes seems too literal and petty to encompass what each one of us desires in the privacy of our own selves.
The wonderful Romain Duris (in his best performance to date) is David, a young husband and father who loses his wife to illness. Her best friend Claire (the also wonderful Anaïs Demoustier), has promised to take care of David and his baby and one day, as she jogs by their house, she walks in to find David dressed as a woman. At first she is offended and adamant that he is a pervert (everybody in this film is an upper-class, suburban Catholic), but then she starts feeling the pull of attraction towards this man who loves to dress up as a woman. They bond over shopping and secrets, and Claire finds she has feelings and fantasies that she had never entertained before. To watch her go from judgment to confusion, to curiosity, to anger, to fantasy and tenderness is the lovely miracle of the movie.
The plot could play as farce, but Ozon prefers to keep things intimate and full of feeling. To see Duris burst with happiness as he walks through the mall as a woman in heels and later to watch him grieve for the fact that he will never be the woman he wants to be is very touching, as is seeing Claire gradually allowing herself to be moved and enlightened by his plight.
In this movie, everyone seems straight as a post, but the moment someone comes out with a different hankering, this creates ripples in everyone. Hence Claire's husband (Raphael Personaz) evinces a tiny spark of interest when Claire tells him that David likes men (it's easier than explaining to him that he likes women but loves to dress as one). To add to the confusion, Claire ends up being in love with the woman in David. In Ozon's gleeful, generous fantasy, it all works out in the end.
Ozon playfully and tactfully suggests that the symbiosis between human emotions and sexuality is endlessly complex and mysterious, and that this is part of the fun, as well as the tears.

Young & Beautiful

The versatile François Ozon is back with the slightly befuddling bourgeois story of Isabelle, a young, beautiful girl (Marine Vacth), who for no discernible reason decides to become a high class hooker. She is 17, lives with her very nice mom, step-dad and brother in a swanky Paris neighborhood, summers in the south of France and voilá, after losing her virginity without any fireworks to a young German man, decides to try prostitution. My guess is that this is as much out of ennui with her privileged life as out of some sort of notion of independence. She doesn't do it because she is horny, she does it because she doesn't get it; she is clinically curious about sex. After Catharine Deneuve in Belle Du Jour, she may also be the coldest fish in that profession. She earns good money (300 euros a pop) which she lovingly fondles as she hides her stash in the closet, under her lingerie. Isabelle is very fortunate in more than one respect: She is stunningly beautiful, she happens to live in the land of fabulous lingerie, and most of her johns are not physically revolting.
I always have a problem with movies that portray prostitutes and their johns as the meeting of supermodels (Pretty Woman, anyone?). I have little patience with the whore fantasies of men. The few whores I've ever seen in real life look, at best, like battered meat trucks, but that's because I'm a remote and innocent bystander, not a high roller with 300 euros to shake at a roll in the hay.
Anyway, the movie is very entertaining, beautifully shot, directed and acted. Isabelle falls for a very handsome older gentleman who treats her nicely, and she has only a couple of relatively lucky brushes with some nasty men. It's nothing physically violent, but in one scene with a john both brutish and cheap, Ozon shows that there's no need to arrive at hard physical violence in order to be violently resentful, demeaning, and full of hatred for women.
Soon, Isabelle's mom and step-dad find out, and that is where things get fun. The mom (the wonderful Geraldine Pailhas), a well-intentioned, liberal woman, is so distraught and at a loss about what could she have done wrong that at one point she suggests, in total seriousness, a girls' only shopping trip to London, to straighten her baby out.
The socio-economics of the film are very engaging. Isabelle lacks for nothing, but nothing is really her own. Since she is legally still a minor, she loses her hard earned money to her parents. Of course her mom suggests donating it to a charity for disadvantaged or abused women. This enrages Isabelle. She has to go back to babysitting, which nets her a paltry 10 euros an hour. I see her point. So would Karl Marx. After all that hard work...
Towards the end, however, the film turns into a philosophical (and to me far less diverting) meditation about love and death, youth and decay, innocence and experience, you know the drill. Still, it's well worth sticking around because Charlotte Rampling shows up, and when that happens, we must stand at attention.
As you can surmise, this is one of the most French movies ever made. Ozon is a puckish observer of the current Parisian bourgeois life, with its safe liberal pieties, Arab servants, multi-cultural affairs on the side, expensive shrinks, and teenagers who love to epater les parents by doing the damnedest things. You can have a blast just thinking about what your own mom would do to you if she ever found out that you were turning fancy tricks at 17. I have a feeling that an all expenses paid trip to Harrod's is not the answer.
Even more fun is trying to imagine the American remake.

In The House

In The House is a very enjoyable movie that is being marketed squarely like a thriller, but is a whimsical, entertaining divertissement by François Ozon on the nature of storytelling and how hooked we humans are on stories. The great Fabrice Luchini stars as Germain, a frustrated novelist and now teacher of literature in a French high school (the Lycee Gustave Flaubert, no less). Among the exasperating mediocrity and indifference of most students, he finds talent in the continuing stories of a young pupil, Claude Garcia, which are supposedly based on his real life experiences. Germain and his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) soon become hooked on Claude's storytelling prowess and on his "to be continued" cliffhangers. Young Claude (the handsome and chilling Ernst Umhauer) writes about insinuating himself in the life of Rapha, a fellow student, who lives in a better house, with a better family and a very desirable mother (Emanuelle Seigner). His story becomes increasingly brazen and perverse, but Germain is so enthralled by the possibility of fashioning this kid into a potential novelist, that he neglects to see how his literary advice is making Claude take more dangerous risks, which if  true, could spell real drama in the lives of the real characters. Ozon keeps the surprises coming, as the story of Claude and Rapha gets entwined on the page with Germain and his wife. All is fair game, as far as the writer is concerned.
This could have been a thriller about a sociopath with literary talent, but it's something more unwieldy, more messy, yet quite delightful.  If it sounds like an insufferably intellectual conceit, rest assured that Ozon keeps it breezy and fun. Soon Claude's stories consume Germain and his wife, and it is as hard for the audience to know what is fiction and what is real as it is for the couple. This is indeed true to fiction, which borrows from real life, sometimes literally, sometimes with invention and exaggeration, and only the writer knows which is which (if they can keep them apart).
Ozon has explored these fiction/reality themes before in movies like Swimming Pool, but here he goes for a light, comedic touch, not devoid of class satire, a gentle ribbing of classisist snobs like Germain and of rich grand dames who own art galleries (where Jeanne works) that show facile art meant to shock their own ilk.
Luchini is dry, deadpan and funny, touchingly distraught by the tale he is helping his student spin. As a curt, distant professor, he comes alive as he takes the sinister Claude under his wing. He is not a drooling, warmly encouraging teacher. He's critical and tough, which makes the kid write with a vengeance. The movie is smart and nimble, but there are a couple of plot points that strain credulity. Having established that all is fair in the telling of a story, Ozon cheekily demands we believe that the otherwise straight arrow Germain is willing to get into major trouble in order just to continue reading. Some of the darker aspects of the story are tonally at odds with the frothy atmosphere. Still, Ozon sustains the fun, intellectual hi-jinks with seamless grace, and a gossamer touch. He seems to enjoy the endless possibilities that the very act of telling the story gives him: shall he land the story into farce or tragedy?  Shall he keep it realistic, or indulge in whimsy? He somehow tries it all, and it works.