In The Crime Is Mine, the 22nd feature from the French auteur François Ozon, a struggling 1930s actor played by Nadia Tereszkiewicz finds herself at the centre of a sensational trial when she is accused of murdering her sexually predatory producer.
Happily, her roommate, who is played by Rebecca Marder, is a budding lawyer. And a good one. Together they navigate cross-examinations and overnight tabloid celebrity in a pacy period comedy that recalls the screwball standards of Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch.
“It’s one of my favourite genres,” says the veteran director. “There is such pleasure in it. I wanted the film to have the spirit of champagne. It has to be sparkling. Otherwise it’s no good.”
Ozon’s fizzy new film is influenced by a macabre early-20th-century trend. In the United States in the 1920s, women on trial for murder sold a lot of newspapers. Chicago, the evergreen Kander and Ebb musical, was adapted from a play by Maurine Dallas Watkins, the Chicago Tribune journalist assigned to cover the trials of Beulah Annan (who inspired Roxie Hart) and Belva Gaertner (who inspired Velma Kelly).
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A decade later, across the Atlantic, women murderers were having a moment in France. In 1933, during a dispute over housework in Le Mans, the maids Christine and Léa Papin brutally killed Léonie and Geneviève Lancelin, their employer and her daughter. Jean Genet based his play The Maids on the case. For the writer Simone de Beauvoir and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the Papin sisters were emblematic of a larger class struggle. The murders continue to inspire books, documentaries and movies, including Claude Chabrol’s La Cérémonie and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite.
The Crime Is Mine strikes a very different tone, yet takes cues from the sensational trial of Violette Nozière, a 19-year-old described by Time magazine in 1935 as “a spoiled brat with a fondness for nightclubs and loose living” who “succeeded, after many attempts, in poisoning her father, a railway engineer, and her mother … The girl stole 1,500 francs from her dead father’s wallet and spent a riotous week in Montmartre bistros”.
“These are, of course, very famous stories in France,” Ozon says. “Isabelle Huppert played Violette in a film by Claude Chabrol.”
Join the dots. Huppert, resplendent in The Crime Is Mine in an extravagant red wig and feathered hat, channels Sarah Bernhardt, France’s silent-screen superstar, as the movie’s real murderer.
“Isabelle is one of my favourite actors,” Ozon says. “We made 8 Women a long time ago. I love to work with Isabelle because then she’s often in very dramatic movies. I prefer to give her comedy. She has a good sense of humour. When I gave her the script, she said, ‘Oh, it’s a short part. I arrive very late in the story. Is it not possible to arrive before?’ And I said to her, ‘Don’t worry: when you arrive you will steal the show.’”
So it proves – although French audiences have been especially thrilled by the performance of the comic actor Dany Boon.
It was for me a way to play with all our ideas of feminism. The film had to have the right distance to tell the story in a funny way. If I set this story today it would have been a drama
“Dany Boon is known for his accent of the north [of France],” says Ozon. “It’s very pronounced. In our film he plays with an accent of the south, an accent from Marseille. So for the French it’s very funny. But I don’t think it works for English people.”
Ozon’s source material was the 1934 play Mon Crime, by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil, in which a compulsive liar confesses to a murder she did not commit. The play has been previously adapted into two Hollywood films, True Confession, from 1937, starring Carole Lombard, and Cross My Heart, from 1946, starring Betty Hutton.
“I changed many things in the play,” Ozon says. “In the original the woman is not an actress; she’s a writer. Huppert’s character is a man. The play is very 1930s. It’s a little bit misogynist. I wanted to give the power to the woman in the story. I wanted to make a film about sisterhood: the 1930s was a time of suffragettes, because women didn’t have the right to vote in France until 1945. I wanted to have a real link between the two girls together fighting against all these stupid men: an incarnation of patriarchy.
“So it was for me a way to play with all our ideas of feminism. The film had to have the right distance to tell the story in a funny way. If I set this story today it would have been a drama.”
It’s impossible to watch The Crime Is Mine without considering “Balance ton porc” (“Call out your pig”), the French response to #MeToo. That’s no accident, says the writer-director.
“These things have created a revolution in the industry of cinema, in America, in school, in terms of the place of women in cinema,” he says. “Things are going in the right direction after #MeToo and the many scandals we’ve had in France. That’s why I felt able to make a comedy about that, because I think things have changed and are changing in a good way.”
The Crime Is Mine is the third instalment of a loose trilogy that includes Potiche, starring Catherine Deneuve as a trophy wife who takes over her husband’s umbrella factory, and 8 Women, in which Deneuve, Huppert, Emmanuelle Béart, Fanny Ardant, Virginie Ledoyen, Danielle Darrieux, Ludivine Sagnier and Firmine Richard find the family patriarch murdered in the study.
“Each time I make a comedy it’s about women, because I think there are not enough comedies with women. Comedies are usually about men. I think women are more inspiring. If you think about comedies from the 1930s, there were great situations in terms of comedy because they could play with the cliche that women were supposed to be stupid, but they are far cleverer than men.
“Potiche was like that. Everyone thought Catherine Deneuve’s character was stupid, but in the end she has all the power and she changes all the rules.”
It’s a very Ozon subgenre, the feminine murder mystery, but he doesn’t have a name for it.
“Don’t ask me this kind of question,” he says, laughing. “Once the film is finished I turn the page. I’m a very bad father with my children! And with my themes. Maybe there are some links with other films, but I don’t intellectualise my work enough to be able to say.”
The last time this newspaper spoke with Ozon, it was to talk about By the Grace of God, his impactful dramatisation of adult survivors of clerical abuse pursuing a paedophile priest, Fr Bernard Preynat, through the courts. The Crime Is Mine is the latest swerve from a film-maker whose career is defined by versatility and unpredictability.
Ozon scored his first international hit with Sitcom, an anarchic tale of a bourgeois family upended by the acquisition of a pet rat. Two years later he explored grief in Under the Sand, through Charlotte Rampling’s poignant depiction of a woman processing the mysterious disappearance of her husband. He is equally impressive directing a fantasy about a baby who sprouts wings (Ricky) or a euthanasia drama (Time to Leave).
Queerness and gender define Water Drops of Burning Rocks, The New Girlfriend and his sex-swapped remake of Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s play The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant. He has flirted with horror (Criminal Lovers), crafted slinky erotic thrillers (Swimming Pool, L’Amant Double) and mastered the elegant costume drama with Angel and Frantz. (Unsurprisingly, Pascaline Chavanne and Constance Allain’s lavish costumes for The Crime Is Mine are reason enough to pay the ticket price.)
He has already completed his next film, The Fall Is Coming, a dark dramedy that brings together a retired sex worker, a resentful daughter and poisonous mushrooms.
“I need to surprise myself because I try to make a film every year, so I don’t want to repeat myself,” Ozon says. “I want the time to experiment, to have some new challenges. Comedy is challenging because you have to be funny all the time. The rhythm has to be perfect. I know it’s maybe disturbing for the critics that they can’t pin me down like a dead butterfly. But audiences like to be surprised. And I prefer to fly wherever I want to go.”
The Crime Is Mine is in cinemas from Friday, October 18th
