The long farewell

In François Ozon’s Under the Sand, a woman obsessively returns to the beach where her husband disappeared. And in the French director’s latest, Time to Leave, Romain (Melvil Poupaud) also is drawn to the beach, a kind of mythic transitional space from one realm to another and emblem of eternity in Ozon’s work (8 Women, Swimming Pool). The ocean in Time to Leave marks the beginning and the end for Romain, a hip, handsome 31-year-old fashion photographer who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. After his diagnosis, and decision not to undergo chemotherapy, Romain spends the remainder of Ozon’s film preparing to die — with varying degrees of success.

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The prolonged, interior, thoughtful nature of Romain’s grappling with death unfolds with a startling degree of veracity; Romain has a messy, complicated life, and Ozon never makes his dying into some maudlin, noble last stand. Romain is instead intensely flawed and human; he’s gay, involved in a strained partnership with an unemployed lay-about; he’s hostile toward his adult sister and remote from his parents; and he has a recreational cocaine habit to boot. Romain’s one deep human connection, he thinks, is to his unconventional, sophisticated grandmother, Laura (Jeanne Moreau). In an expression of their intense bond, Laura tells him that she would willingly die alongside him if he wanted an early exit.

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Like other gay directors drawn to melodrama (Pedro Almodovar, Todd Haynes) Ozon is someone whose work expresses a deep tenderness toward the subtleties of human experience and a characteristic blend of intelligence, frank sexuality and warmth. Ozon successfully gets us into Romain’s interior frame of mind and the sense of solitude his death has given him. In an especially touching scene at a busy seaside teeming with people in various stages of undress, Romain seems to find his first expression of absolute comfort and peace. He sits on a towel observing the people around him, bathes in the ocean, snaps photos. It becomes clear, from point-of-view shots of his sandy feet to his body bobbing in the water, that he is collecting the sensations of living.

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In this and other moments, Romain engages with the fleeting pleasure of being alive in a way that so often escapes the living.