Ricky (2009)

Ricky is a French-Italian film comedy-drama first released in 2009, directed by François Ozon.  The film is based on a story by Rose Tremain and stars Alexandra Lamy, Sergi López, Mélusine Mayance, Arthur Peyret and André Wilms.  Our overall rating for this film is: good.


Katie is having a hard life as a single mother.  Her boyfriend walked out on her after making her pregnant and she has had to bring up her daughter Lisa alone, working long hours in a factory to earn a modest wage to keep them both.  Then, one day, the sunshine comes back into Katie’s life.  She meets a man, Paco, and she falls in love.  The result of this happy romance is that Katie is pregnant for a second time.  On this occasion, she gives birth to a baby boy, whom Lisa christens Ricky.  Not long after the birth, Katie notices some strange bruises on her newborn’s back and concludes that Paco has been beating him.  Paco denies this and decides to end his relationship with Katie.  Then something happens which takes Katie completely by surprise.  It appears that Ricky is no ordinary baby...

If there is one thing that can be said about director François Ozon (and perhaps the only thing that can be said with any certainty) it is that he is never predictable.  Over the past decade the one-time enfant terrible of French cinema has entertained and confounded audiences with a series of films (roughly one a year) which, on the face of it, have nothing to connect them other than a slightly warped view of human nature.  Ozon’s films differ in both style and subject, ranging from surreal parodies of everyday middleclass life to a Bergman-like dissection of a failed marriage, via an über-kitsch musical whodunnit.  Ozon’s latest film Ricky offers another bizarre excursion into unfamiliar territory, a hard-edged social realist drama centred around a flying baby.

Ricky seems to be the answer to one of those irritating conundrums you get in Christmas crackers: what do you get if you cross a Ken Loach film with one made by David Cronenberg?  Perhaps the most surprising aspect of this film is its realist handling of a fantastic proposition.  You can just imagine how Ricky would have turned out if it had been made in Hollywood - all saccharine and CGI, a whimsical fantasy that is perfect for that family afternoon TV slot on Christmas Day.  Ozon’s film is more wholesome and quirkier than this, and a far more tantalising prospect for the cynically minded, a film that offers a fresh and idiosyncratic reflection on the miracle of child birth.

Rose Tremain’s fanciful short story Moth is not something that appears to be readily adaptable for cinema but François Ozon evidently saw something in it that would allow him to express his fascination with one aspect of life that we all take for granted, the existence of babies.   His film also has a subtle allegorical dimension, reminding us of the uniqueness of each individual human life, the moral being that every baby that is born has its own unique abilities, its own needs, and its own way of looking at the world.  We don’t need to sprout wings to know that each and every one of us is a one-off.

Ricky has that slick and thoughtful quality that we have come to expect of Ozon, but it lacks the gravitas and maturity of some of the director’s previous films.  After a promising first half, the film slips back a few gears and loses both momentum and a sense of direction.  It is as if Ozon has set himself a challenge that he does not quite know how to resolve.  Just what can you do with a flying baby once you have introduced the concept and exhausted all the obvious gags?  The failings in the script department are to some extent compensated for by the well-judged performances from the leads Alexandra Lamy and Sergi López, even if both actors are visibly struggling to prevent the focus from being ripped away from them by the charismatic baby performer Arthur Peyret.  The special effects are also of a high standard and, to Ozon’s credit, used sparingly so as not to undermine the film’s realist slant.  You will believe that a baby can fly...

© James Travers 2010

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