At the beginning of the 1930s, France was confronted with two new phenomena that would radically change the country in the medium term. One came geographically from the northwest. The other from the south. From the sunny Mediterranean Sea, a fashionable drink called Pastis arrived in the capital Paris. The aniseed liqueur, which is now considered the epitome of French bistro culture, was only invented in 1920 by a gentleman named Pernod to replace the now banned absinthe. And a gentleman named Ricard, who wanted to market the drink as a specialty from Marseille, had the Occitan word “pastis” printed on the labels of his bottles in 1932.
In François Ozon’s film My Fabulous Crime, which is set during that time, the unemployed actress Madeleine (Nadia Tereszkiewicz) is still completely unfamiliar with the drink and only tries it when the Marseille-born builder Paramede (Danny Boon) assures her , that is now the big new thing in his homeland.
At the same time, from the other, the cold, dark direction, the rumor of a far more important novelty came to France. In Ozon’s film, the young lawyer Pauline (Rebecca Marder) explains in a fiery court plea that her friend Madeleine would probably never have committed the crime of which she is accused if conditions in France were like those in Germany. Women have been allowed to vote there since 1919 and have a say in power in the country – French women were only allowed to do this later.
Francois Ozon in Cannes
What: Marechal Aurore/ABACA/picture alliance
Madeleine’s crime, which gives the film its title (originally “Mon crime”), is the murder of a producer who wanted to give her a small role but asked for sex in return. Director Ozon, who also wrote the screenplay, doesn’t have to do much to make any viewer think of Harvey Weinstein. It was enough that he changed the murdered man’s profession: in the play on which the script is based, he was an entrepreneur; Ozone made him a producer.
During the conversation in Berlin, he explains it like this: “I decided to change that so that I could talk about things I know. There is a French tradition of looking at life as theater – it stretches from Jean Renoir and Sasha Guitry to even François Truffaut. Everyone plays a role in life, everyone plays their life.” Because the action is set in the theater and film milieu, Ozon’s film now comes across as a commentary on the American affair with which the social upheaval represented by the hashtag #metoo just really got going.
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The point is that precisely through this Weinsteinization of the original French material, a piece that Hollywood once appropriated returns home. During the interview in Berlin, François Ozon said that he was also unaware of the very successful 1935 comedy “Mon crime” by Georges Berr and Louis Verneuil. He discovered her when he saw the 1937 American comedy “A Murder Swindle” starring Carole Lombard. It’s based on the piece.
Ozon procured the original text, of which he says today: “Of course, it corresponds to the patriarchal and misogynistic habitus of the epoch.” Nothing of this remains in Ozon’s film. The men may still be in power, but they are all more or less lovable jerks who are being manipulated by women with increasing skill. And watching it is fun. Ozone keeps his promise to “tell something about poverty and the balance of power between men and women”. But what sounds like the looming proclamation of a dark sociological film essay becomes a comedy in Ozon’s hands that combines the sharp gaze of classic films like Renoir’s The Rules of the Game with the pace of Hollywood’s screwball comedies of the 1930s.
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Some might also think of Woody Allen’s “Bullets over Broadway” from 1994, because here and there questions of morality and crime in the stage environment are dealt with and there are great actresses in both films who enthusiastically adopt the cliché of the old-style theater diva. With Woody Allen it is Dianne Wiest, with Ozon it is Isabelle Huppert, with whom he is working together again for the first time in 20 years – their last film together was “8 Frauen” in 2002.
Odette Chaumette, played by Huppert, is externally styled with her dramatic dresses and hats entirely after the images of Sarah Bernhardt and other legends of the Belle Epoque. But that also marks her out as an artist whose time is long gone. Only the older men in the film still remember their earlier successes and love them for it, the young women like Madeleine and Pauline don’t even mean their names anymore. “I thought of those actresses who were big in theater and silent film and disappeared when talkies came along,” says Ozon. “It’s a tragic thing. And I thought it was funny to let the biggest French star, Isabelle Huppert, play such a forgotten one.”
Huppert’s appearance heralds a turning point in the plot. Because her Odette Chaumette is the real murderess, which can be spoiled because it is already revealed in the advertising. She sees with envy how Madeleine, after she has been acquitted – the lawyer Pauline has managed to portray the act as self-defense by a virtuous girl – suddenly becomes famous and makes a career. She now wants “her crime” back – or alternatively 300,000 francs and a new role to keep her mouth shut.
It’s a pleasure to see how Madeleine and Pauline solve this problem with perfectly engineered intrigues. It is possible, although Madeleine fails, to use her body as a bribe for a good cause. The target apologizes, saying they love their wife and want to remain faithful to her. What a surprising punchline in a French film!
keystone of the trilogy
For Ozon, “My Fabulous Crime” is the capstone of a trilogy that began with “8 Women” and “The Jewel” (with Catherine Deneuve and Gérard Depardieu, 2010). Ozon puts it this way: “’8 Women’ is a film about patriarchy in which all women define themselves through the absent man. ‘The Jewel’ is a film about matriarchy, with Catherine Deneuve first taking economic power, then going into politics – when I was making it, it looked like Ségolène Royal could become French President. And ‘My Fabulous Crime’ is now a feminist film about sisterhood.” The extended meaning of the word “sister” – based on the “fraternité” in the state motto, which does not only refer to relatives – also helps Pauline in the end to resolve the conflict with Odette to overcome Chaumette.
The building contractor Paramede, who profited enormously from the death of the producer because he would otherwise have had to pay him an annuity for a real estate transaction for a long time, is also involved, not entirely altruistically. Danny Boon plays him with a hairstyle that makes him look like a Mediterranean James Cagney. Boon is not only the epitome of the North French in France since his film “Welcome to the Sch’tis”, which was also very successful in Germany.
When Ozon cast him for the role of Paramede from Marseille, it was a bit like asking Gerhard Polt, originally from Munich, if he wanted to play the captain of Köpenick. It took Ozon a bit of persuasion: “He’s usually identified as a northern Frenchman. But I wanted him to play a guy from Marseille. And he does it very well. Two days before we started shooting, he came to me and said, ‘I can’t do it with that southern French accent, it’s going to be ridiculous. If you want, I’ll do it with a Belgian accent.’ For the French, the Belgian accent is very strange – but that’s like the north. So I insisted. And he did it very well.”
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While only French people can appreciate this special joke in the original version, there is another little inside joke that maybe even more viewers in Germany will understand: The film in which Madeleine plays her first leading role is called: “Les larmes amère de Marie Antoinette” ( “The Bitter Tears of Marie Antoinette”). This is of course an allusion to Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s “The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant”, which Ozon 2022 filmed as “Peter von Kant” with men. “I made the joke to amuse myself. When I was shooting the movie within the movie, what I wanted most was to see her severed head fall. In that era you would probably have seen the film Marie Antoinette. Called ‘The Queen’ or something. But I decided to call it ‘The Bitter Tears of Marie Antoinette’. A lot of people won’t get the joke. Doesn’t matter.”
The decapitated Queen Marie Antoinette also fits well into the film because the men here embody the cluelessness of the “Ancien Régime”. You would think they would answer the women’s demands: “Then let them eat cake!” But the change will not take place quite as murderously as it did in 1789, says Ozon: “Today there is also a movement for harmonization of power relations; Women are challenging old male dominance. But it’s not a revolution, it’s not a war; it’s not that serious.”
Which brings us to the initial question: when did women finally get the right to vote? It was by no means the Popular Front government of Léon Blum in 1936/37 that introduced it, explains Ozon: “It was only de Gaulle who did it in 1945. The leftists have always said: If women vote, they will vote like their husbands – on the right. And indeed the women in Germany did that too.” Only in films do women always act reliably in their own interests and those of humanity.
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