Francois Ozon

This book is the first full-length study of the films of Francois Ozon. From his clutch of award-winning shorts in the mid-1990s to his increasingly celebrated features, including Swimming Pool , Les amants criminel and 5x2 , and the star-studded millennial classic of high camp, 8 femmes (2001), Ozon’s work has remained bold, witty, often gruesome and always colorful. What emerges from Andrew Asibong’s passionate and critical analysis, however, is the extent to which Ozon’s seemingly light touch never ceases to engage with the fundamentally weighty question of existential transformation, a transformation that affects both his protagonists and his audiences. Asibong considers how Ozon’s apparently subversive cinematic representation of female and gay sexualities, as well as his ongoing fascination with sadomasochistic power relations, both operate at a far more complex psychoanalytic and political level than many of Ozon’s champions and critics are willing to admit.He then goes on to suggest what may be at stake in Ozon’s alternately utopian and cynical filmic flirtation with the construction and deconstruction of contemporary social relations. Asibong also assesses Ozon’s crucial and highly idiosyncratic contribution to the ‘excessive’ film genres - horror, musical and melodrama - and posits that his manipulation of these Hollywood staples may have an ethical function as well as a purely aesthetic one. Revealing Ozon as a highly adept ‘fan’ of a whole range of thought, literature and cinema, Asibong places the precocious French auteur in an intellectual yet highly accessible critical framework, allowing Ozon’s importance for a thoroughly postmodern film-going generation to be given at last the lucid attention it deserves.