esrosedotblog

HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE

Today's film was the first I will be seeing by the writer and director Francois Ozon.

Ozon is a mischief maker and this film is a good example of his penchant for showing people with their emotional pants down. In almost all his films, some of those people are always/usually/presumably gay.

That does not make this a gay film even though it is based on an early (19 years old) by Rainer Werner Fassbinder who was.

The young man in this film is 19. His orientation is unformed, sort of.

OK.

Let the analysis begin.

Oh. The film? It is

Gouttes d'eau sur pierres brûlantes / Water Drops on Burning Rocks (1999)

Fassbinder wrote this as a play and Ozon keeps it as a play. One set.

It begins with the 19 year old coming home with a 50 something year old man. There follows a coy dance which ends in bed.

That is Act One. Double meaning here as it turns out. There are two or three other "acts".

The boy's girlfriend shows up for the second act and she ends up, like the boy, naked at the end of the section.

By the third act an ex of the older man shows up and joins the show.

The big thing here is the dialog. Funny, anxious, scary. It stirred a storm of emotions.

All the actors are up to this. It is beautifully done. The set is meticulously decorated and acts, at times, as a backup chorus to the acting and the story.

This is the kind of play that should never be opened up. If it lost its theatricality it would go up in steam just like the drops of water on the hot rocks.

I liked it. It is a sure 3 and perhaps a 4 out of Netflix5.

Well, it is a 4. I would not mind seeing it again at all and perhaps I will.

It whets the appetite for more Ozon.

Oh. It is not a musical. But it is Fassbinder/Ozon. They break the fourth wall.

Labels: films