Time to Leave

This film's main theme is such a cliché and so simple: What would you do if you are told that you only have 2-3 months to live? How would you deal with things? Would you fight, and do everything in your power to, perhaps, experience that curing miracle, or would you accept things, as a matter of course... and wait for death to come. This film really makes you think. The main character, marvelously performed by Melvil Poupaud, is not really a sympathetic man, is he? Or is he? Aren't you master of your own life, especially when you have a short time left... He obviously wishes to solve some "personal problems" (relations with people around him which he doesn't find as they should be) in an accelerated, black and white way. To create something clear and defined before dieing... Obviously his life had been a mess. But relations are also about giving and taking, and about accepting imperfect things in relationships. Throughout the movie you get more sympathy with Romain. The telephone call with his sister (whom he had told some unkind things just before) is moving. 'It isn't about you, it's about me". Didn't Fassbinder tell us "Each man kills the thing he loves"... Do you want to protect others by not saying you are going to die... This is altruism in an egoistic way, isn't it? The film is a melodrama, but in my case it made me think... And that's the purpose of a good film, isn't it? All the characters are well typecast and performed. At times the film is even moving, but a tearjerker it never becomes... It's not a new "Love Story". Romain's "Pardon", a sorry softly spoken, with nobody around and never addressed to the person it was meant to, was a moving moment in the film. Also the fact that Romain being gay (and his gay life style) is no theme for the plot in the film, is absolutely refreshing. Homosexuality should just be one of the many facts of life (in the lives of many). (Joris, Amsterdam)

Time to Leave (2005)

Besides being interminably sad, even when it has shreds of love and hope and genuine friendship built in, Time to Leave is also a tonic and a balm. It makes the worst of situations reasonable. Not good, not desirable, but imaginable, which is something, too. It's an absorbing movie at its best, but is often slow and a hair predictable, within the range of themes in films of our era.

As a movie, beyond the subject (which is what it is), there is a feeling of the ordinary even as the characters are often a bit beyond even extraordinary. The welcome spectre of Jeanne Moreau as his grandmother is great, and yet their relationship is tender to the point of incestuous. Maybe. And his love for his father, very touching, also trembles a little on the edge of beautiful liberalism. What I mean is, for all its touching, realistic touches, there are many moments that cut across the veneer that we are to believe. And it loses it's candid believability, leaning into an idealized sheen, without ever leaving it totally, into a fairy tale of some kind.

So I didn't quite settle into the whole experience very well, and watched with impatience by halfway through. Maybe his lack of denouement is ours, as well, but that reminds me of art school when people with bad art would say something along the lines of, "I wanted it that way." Director Francois Ozon may have wanted this steady trauma and despair laced with love and deflated by the banal, but he could have also wanted something that left us viewers more fully moved, entranced, enlightened, or even, alas, puzzled. I was touched, in the end, by my own feelings and fear of dying, and of being surprised by its coming too soon, and the movie did less to illuminate that as to simple serve as a reminder about it, leaving the work, and the awfulness, up to me.

Ozon is a strange figure. Strange in a sense that actually makes him normal: sometimes controversial, sometimes authentic, but always a great analyst of the emotion's spectrum.

It becomes clear really early that the film will be more of a contemplative portrayal of death than a daring fight lead against it. And sometimes it's better that way, to take things as they come. Thirty one year old Romain isolates himself from his family and friends and deals with several stages of the whole "accepting death" experience. A so dreaded experience. Consequently, the film is distant and may seem tedious at times, but all the means serve their purpose.

"Le temps qui reste" (gorgeous title, I feel obliged to emphasize this) is a difficult film: homosexuality, solitude and death are themes which few can bear light-heartedly. Still, Romain's process of severing himself from himself is intriguing at all times and the film's final sequence is of a most sincere impact. It's about adapting to the idea of dying in a glacial modern society.

We are generally alone in this world and all we have is our family. And if we lose that, we are left with thoughts, never to be forgotten. Le temps qui reste.

Funny enough, I didn't expect this film to be such a great moment of cinema. I had read a couple of reviews, and most of them were rather lukewarm. I experienced this film like a soft punch in the face and the stomach, and I felt a kind of empathy with most of the characters (except maybe with the sister), because they all represent a problem in modern life. And the actors were so good at their job, without forcing it, that I didn't even think 'Oh wait, but it's Jeanne Moreau playing the part of...", etc. And there's even some humor: sometimes I laughed, and not because I felt ill at ease, but just because it was plainly funny. But it's not a comedy. It's a reflection about love, life and death. How those three can be simple, beautiful, and painful. A beautiful parable on life without any screaming, violence, shooting (like in 'Crash', for instance, which was also a beautiful film in its own way). Go and see it! It might change the way you look at life. If only for an hour or two...

After I read the critics (I was lucky I did it after seeing the movie), I felt like the people who say they're tolerant and modern were completely intolerant and conservative. They only saw the homosexuality and the nonsense story about a girl who can't have children with her husband so she asks a guest in a restaurant to have a child with her, and said it was just trying to shock the visitors. But I agree with those who say it was not the main point of the movie. I think it just tried to say that these people live on our sides and that they're the same as we are.

I accept for some people the movie can sound a little bit like a cliché or another story about dying. But for me the feelings were different. It was interesting to see a man who bears his secret on his own, because he can't open to his family and isn't brave enough to tell his boyfriend. Then he visits his grandmother and decides to tell her because as he says she's also close to death. When he's with her, he opens to her and also to himself. The scene where she confesses that "tonight I'd like to leave with you" was the most beautiful and most emotional for me.

Well, the story has it's mistakes, but maybe the plot is not the most important thing there. I just didn't care about what the director wanted to show, but about what he's actually showed. For me it was a story about a man who goes through the first shock, anger and desperation to the acceptation of the destiny with a smile on his lips.

I liked the movie very much and I think the actors did an unbelievable job.