Francois Ozon is a frustratingly soft-core avant-garde filmmaker who, one senses, keeps drawing back from revealing his full potential.
His full-length movies, including Sitcom and Eight Women, show some very real cinematic flair, but there's a feeling that while there is a lot of slick professionalism on show, there's an emptiness at the core.
His most successful movie to date, the audacious Swimming Pool, is a movie which demands repeat viewing. But all the time I keep asking myself just how much depth there really is in this conjuror's piece of film-making. Strip away the intriguing puzzle-elements, and would anything at all be left?
The Short Films of Daniel Ozon is a sampler of the director's work before he was launched into the feature-length mainstream.
On show is the bright advertisement-like film technique which is used to enmesh us into all sorts of subversive human dramas and comedies. He plays here with both straight and gay sensibilities, though it's clear the gay world is the one he's most at home with.
There are five works here. The first disc brings us the major piece, the 52-minute chiller See the Sea, a macabre tale set on the sun-drenched French coast, which is let down ultimately by a climax which we've been expecting from the opening minutes on. This disc closes with the comic and quite touching gay comedy Summer Dress.
The second disc brings us four more short films, of roller-coaster quality. The very short (4 minutes) Action Verite is a disturbingly amusing tale of youthful sexual exploration, while X 2000 is an eight-minute homage to the great surrealist filmmaker Luis Bunuel -- but, unfortunately, without Bunuel's penetrating intelligence.
La Petite Mort (24-minutes) links, as you would expect from the title, related themes of death and orgasm. Perhaps the most successful short film in the entire set is the final one, Bedtime Stories, a 27-minute frantically fast-moving assemblage of a series of chapters in life. This is witty and very sexy, and is probably, coupled with La Petite Mort, worth the price of admission into this two-disc set.
Both the films on disc one have been anamorphically mastered for maximum transfer quality, and the result shows in beautifully rendered details and tones.
Ozon shows a marked love of natural light -- the shadows are mostly within his stories, not within his images -- and these transfers do justice to his pictorial eye.
On disc two, aspect ratios vary and one film, La Petite Mort, is letter-boxed instead of being given an anamorphic transfer. But the overall quality is still very high, though short of anamorphic standard.
Well, Francois Ozon is avant-garde enough to be interesting, but don't look for great subtlety or intellectual daring here. He challenges us occasionally, but is most of the time coming to us in a quite pretty and soft-centred way, unlike the sylish rigor shown by such absolute cinematic masters who play with similar themes, Pedro Almodovar and Luis Bunuel.
But we are still seeing film-making which is a lot more rewarding than 90 per cent of the garbage spewing forth from Hollywood and its satellite centres, so give Ozon some of your time and you may find yourself well enough rewarded.
