Directed by François Ozon
Certificate 15
102 minutes
Released 21 March

Judge not lest ye be judged, we are told. At the start of this latest drama from François Ozon, an ever-reliable director who rarely repeats himself, a devoted, eighty-something grandmother Michelle (Hélène Vincent) accidentally gives her forty-something daughter Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier) food poisoning when she picks and cooks mushrooms.

Once out of hospital, the daughter, unable to forgive her mum, takes the disappointed grandson Lucas (Galan Erlos) – who was to have spent the summer holidays in the country with his beloved granny – back home to Paris.

The daughter’s reaction isn’t really about the food, though – there are other things going on below the surface in the lives of Michelle and her seventy-something best friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Bolasko), things in Michelle’s past for which her daughter is unable to forgive her and which have, for years, been eating away at Valérie, turning her into someone constantly at odds with the very spirit of life.

Other characters play into this drama: Marie-Claude has a son, Vincent (Pierre Lottin), who is due to be released from prison; even as Michelle tries to help him out, his mother is convinced that it will all end badly.

Michelle attends church, and although she never really talks about it, presumably has a Catholic faith. We are offered no such evidence of faith with any of the other characters, but all of them are living with things that have happened in the past which inevitably produce consequences in the present.

One of Ozon’s stated reasons for making the film was to show to elderly women on the screen, and both Vincent and Bolasko are fantastic. So too are all the other actors involved.

And the director’s abilities as a storyteller remain second to none. This is a film that’s never predictable and delivers quite a few surprises, although never purely for their own sake; Ozon is clearly fascinated by the effect people’s past histories have on their present day existence, what the Bible describes as ‘the sins of the fathers being visited on the children’. An absolute must-see.

Jeremy Clarke is a film critic. jeremycprocessing.com

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This article was published in the Issue 2 – 2025 edition of Reform

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