Le Refuge (2010) - film review

Mousse and Louis are young, beautiful and rich.  They are in love.  They could not be happier.  Then they discover drugs and the idyll is soon over.  Mousse is devastated when Louis dies from an overdose, but this is not the end of her sorrows.  She then learns that she is pregnant.  Hopelessly lost, she flees to a house far from Paris.  A few months later, Louis’s brother joins her in her solemn refuge...

After a bizarre detour which took in the kitsch historical drama Angel (2007) and the whimsical fantasy Ricky (2009), director François Ozon returns to the kind of intimate realist drama which he is better suited for.   Le Refuge evokes something of the subtle mystery and poetry of Ozon’s previous Sous le sable (2000) and 5x2 (2001) but lacks the intensity and substance of these two films and is a surprisingly bland offering from a director who is anything but bland.

Ozon apparently made this film in a hurry so that he could make use Isabelle Carré’s real-life pregnancy.  The film certainly looks as though more time could have been spent on it, since it lacks structure and characters feels more like vague shadows than real people.   If Le Refuge is an attempt to show how a woman is affected by her pregnancy then it surely falls short of its objective by several dozen furlongs.  Insubstantial, self-conscious and at times clumsily arty, Ozon’s latest meditation on life manages to be both vacuous and mystifying.

© James Travers 2010

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