Le refuge

Dir. François Ozon, 2009

When there's a new Ozon film on I tend to go and see it. Usually there is something solid-enough about them, perhaps 'French enough' too, to warrant a viewing. Le refuge is... ok. It has its moments.

It begins with some awesome shots of central Paris, Metro trains squealing their way from place to place. Cuts to a couple submerged in a heroin addiction in Mother's fancy bourgeois apartment. The sexy drug-dealer arrives via Metro and gives them some heroin that turns out to be cut with shit. The man of the couple wakes up before the girl, injects (graphically, and squirm-inducingly) another shot into his neck. He wakes up dead. Or doesn't wake up alive. Whatever. He's a goner. She lives, but wonders why, assuming they both had the same amount of the same dodgy heroin. Oh, by the way, the Doctor says, your fella is dead and you're pregnant. The posh family tell her to get rid, she does one and we meet her again heavily preggers at a stunning little house in the countryside that belongs to an old squeeze we never see (& who we're told doesn't know she's preggers because he's blind).

Gay brother of dead bloke turns up to stay. She's still dead miserable, but ya know... she starts to get the hots for him but he's gay and he ends up fucking her green grocer in her house. What a rude guest!

The main theme of this film begins around this point - the other stuff being typical Ozon kind of stuff - and that seems to be something half saucy about pregnant women. First of all there's a woman on the beach who comes up and proclaims how wonderful being pregnant is and can she touch the bump. The woman turns evangelical and starts going on about the great pain that must rightfully be suffered for this baby, etc. It comes across like she may be some kind of pro-life nut-job ridden by her own guilt or something - but I suppose she could also act as an apparition. Which is all too much for Mousse and makes her storm off.

As the gay brother is still knocking around with her green grocer, she decides to go off to a cafe where a strange middle-aged man buys her a drink and comes on to her. 'You're into pregnant women?' she asks, 'Oui,' he replies and they go back to his apartment. When his wife was pregnant he couldn't touch her for 9 months, he was repulsed. Ever since that he's got a bonk-on for the preggers. She can't do it facing him and gets him to sit behind her and let his hands come exploring forward. She has a massive, quiet, dreamy orgasm within about ten seconds. The old perv's face is hilarious - it's a good moment, a turning of the tables on the idea that men frequently orgasm before satisfying women, and on the notion that this man has picked her up to use her for his own specific erotic desires and she's ended up using him and spitting him back out.

She feels a bit better after this. Goes along to a disco with the two gay men. While they're making out, she dances with a hot young man who is really into her and is getting turned-on. His hands soon stray onto her pregnant belly, which gives him a cob-on but really narks her off. She pushes him away and does one.

Eventually the gay brother comes home off his head on pills or something and she undresses him and they have sex, which seems like pretty good sex in that heavy, off-your-head, kind of way. During the sex he seems quite into fondling the pregnant belly and all that. Next morning she declares the night before beautiful, he goes along with it but you can sense he's not all that impressed with the woman aspect, but seems moved by having been intimate with the pregnant belly. Perhaps Ozon is saying this is something erotically appealing to gay men as it is an impossibility within their world; it is the taboo of the not-possible? Maybe.

He leaves. Months later, he visits her in hospital after she's had the baby. She nips outside for a cigarette, thinks about it, then legs it. The film is rounded off with her on the Metro writing a letter to the gay brother about how she knows he loves the baby and will always be there for it. But she's off. She may be back at some point, who knows.

Throughout the film she is on morphine because you can't come off heroin when you're pregnant without risking a miscarriage.

I've done the rare thing of writing out the story. But that's mostly because I'd find it hard to boil down. It has many familiar themes from Ozon (and a lot of French) films, especially around bourgeois standards and behaviour.

Mousse at one point wonders whether her partner took an overdose to escape from the responsibility of becoming a father. Her morphine is surely an escape from pain. The mother of the posh family instructs her to have an abortion to escape the responsibility of her son having a descendant (she wanted an end to the social embarrassment of his death (and life)). Le refuge.

A lot going on behind the modest action. Not necessarily an enthralling film all the same.