Sydney Film Festival II :: Le Refuge: Mousse is delicious even if it's Paul's

I’m in love with a pregnant junkie. Well, maybe I’m in love with a projected self, because I think I want to be this pregnant junkie. Sure, her boyfriend dies after an overdose (note to self: wake up and have a short black, not a shot of smack to the neck), and she’s in a coma for six hours, but she wakes up to what is possibly le plus beau médecin in celluloid history, gets only slightly, snidely berated by the dead boyfriend’s mother (but who gives a shit, ’cos you’re smashing her Jack Daniels anyway), then turns up in the eponymous villa sur la plage. This she gets by way of a guy she slept with when she was 16. And thinks he’s her dad. And he’s blind. But we don’t see him. I guess we’re blind too.

Have I mentioned the pregnant junkie’s name is Mousse?

Actually, losing a boyfriend sounds terrible. Wait, here comes his much more handsome brother now. Man, he is brown. In a great scene when Mousse and the brother, Paul (Louis-Ronan Choisy), go the beach, he says, “I’m a sun worshipper.” The camera worships him too. In shots reminiscent of Australian photographer’s Max Dupain’s famous Sunbaker, Mousse and the camera lingers on Paul’s bare body, violating that consensual negative hallucination that exists amongst friends at the beach: not seeing what is there.

François Ozon crafts a melodrama with unconventional characters occupying familiar relational positions, much like his Swimming Pool (2003). It’s not age that provides the welcome frisson here, but Paul’s homosexuality. This spins the scene: Serge, a man who we think is kind of a lapdog obedient to the alluring Mousse, hooks up with Paul. The inevitability of Mousse and Paul getting together, in some way, is detoured, a ballad which we follow not really knowing the outcome.

Music is used in a meaningful way, too. Unlike Knocked Up, where pregnant women are turned away, Le Refuge contains a club in which Mousse can wave her hands in the air, and not care, if just for a while. Not hearing the wise words of the song playing – “We don’t need anyone to feel alone” – Mousse’s high is deflated when she comes across Serge and Paul making out. There is also the constant refrain of the movie’s theme, tinkled by Paul on the piano, and sung by both at some stage.

I’ve not mentioned Isabella Carré who plays Mousse. She possesses “the handsome, but compressed and even cruel mouth” Dickens ascribes to Miss Wade in Little Dorrit, and deploys it artfully. She is in almost every shot, and the film rides her performance. Almost certainly actually pregnant, she uses then doesn’t use her body in a sophisticated way. It is the focus of a crazy woman at the beach who beseeches her, on her knees, to give and give and give. It is the initial focus of a man who boldly approaches her in a café – he digs pregnant chics. This is nicely complicated when she asks him to rock her, prefiguring the baby to come, and remembering the foetal embrace of Mousse and her boyfriend when they got high at the start of the film. Her look to camera at the end of the film, daring us to judge, can only be cut arbitrarily.

Screen memories: the chimp’s face of nipples and stomach that emerges when Mousse is in the bath; the freely floating dome in the milky bath water; split images of Mousse; Mousse.