By Peter Keough

Redemption awaits When Fall Is Coming.

When Fall Is Coming. Directed by François Ozon. At the Coolidge Corner Theatre, May 9.

Hélène Vincent in When Fall Is Coming. Photo: Film Forum

In two recent French films, mushrooms bode no good. Or do they? Alain Guiraudie’s Misericordia and now François Ozon’s When Fall Is Coming are both exquisite in their ambiguity. They are also both dogged in their humanism, are set in painterly French provincial towns, and include a priest who believes in a gospel of forgiveness and nonjudgmental love.

In When Fall Is Coming the priest appears only in cameos at the beginning and end. He is first seen reading from Luke 7:36-50 about the “sinful woman” whom Jesus forgives. The words hit home for Michelle (Hélène Vincent, in a compelling, nuanced performance), who appears to be a respectable grandmotherly type living in retirement in a village in Burgundy. In the past, however, she had been a prostitute in Paris and apparently did pretty well at it, judging from her current lovely house and an apartment in Paris, which she had given to her daughter, Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier).

Unfortunately, Valérie is not grateful for the apartment or for any of Michelle’s lavish generosity over the years. She despises her mother for the profession she took up — according to Michelle, it was her only choice to make life easier for her daughter. Valérie has not accepted that rationale; instead, she has become filled with rage and self-loathing, which has led to depression and a broken marriage. Valérie has her own bedevilments as well, and this intransigent bitterness, strengthened by a traumatic incident, has only increased her paranoia. She has forbidden Michelle from seeing Lucas (Garlan Erlos), her son and Michelle’s grandson. Since one of Michelle and Lucas’s biggest pleasures is the time they spend together at her home, this decision breaks the hearts of both.

For consolation, Michelle seeks the company of her old friend Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko), who had been a fellow sex worker back in the day and has also been undergoing difficulties with her only child — Vincent (Matt Dillon lookalike Pierre Lottin). He’s just been released from prison, where he had been incarcerated for an undisclosed crime. Indeed, he looks the part of an ex-con — with his pencil-thin mustache and slicked-back hair, he resembles a heavy in a ’40s film noir. But his appearance conceals a good heart; as his long-suffering mother puts it, “He wants to do right but he always does wrong.” To which Michelle replies, “What matters is he wants to do right.” This impulse to do right draws Vincent into sympathy with Michelle, who begins to regard him almost as her own son.

Though pitched as a “thriller,” and though it includes a suspicious death and even a ghost, When Fall Is Coming is sneakily complex and ethereal. In films ranging from See the Sea (1997), to Swimming Pool (2003), to In the House (2012) and Peter Von Kant (2022), Ozon has shown himself to be a master of tonal subtlety, generic fungibility, and the perversities of human relationships. Here, he achieves his customary effects, in part, through the use of ellipses: he will cut a scene short and jump ahead to another scene — without fully resolving the previous episode. At the risk of supplying a spoiler, here is a key example of this technique: the director shows someone entering an apartment. An argument occurs. Someone reaches for a cigarette (like mushrooms, cigarettes in this film signify trouble ahead) from a precarious position. A cut is made. What happened?

Another tactic by which Ozon achieves his artistry is through scenes of ineffable poignancy, as when Michelle secretly glimpses Vincent tenderly going through the bags of Lucas’s toys that she has, in anger and despair, discarded: the look on both their faces is heartbreaking, a recognition of the innocence lost before the fall into experience.

Peter Keough writes about film and other topics and has contributed to numerous publications. He had been the film editor of the Boston Phoenix from 1989 to its demise in 2013 and has edited three books on film, most recently For Kids of All Ages: The National Society of Film Critics on Children’s Movies (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019).