‘When Fall is Coming’ Review: François Ozon’s Deceptively Calm, Collected Film About an Unraveling Rural Retirement

variety.com:

Guy Lodge Film Critic True to its title, François Ozon’s new film “When Fall is Coming” is awash in the aesthetics of what people far younger than its octogenarian protagonist would call autumncore, with a bit of cottagecore for good measure.

In the sleepy, picturesque Burgundy valley where it largely unfolds, the leaves are rusting and crisping, chunky knitwear is coming out of hibernation, and through the screen, you can just about feel the air turning cold enough to splinter.

Yet as the film progresses, its timeline spanning months and then years, the weather never changes. The life of sweet-natured retiree Michelle (Hélène Vincent) is seemingly fixed in a perennial fall, as is the film’s mood of quiet, almost comforting melancholy — until, amid this appearance of strange, ochre-hued seasonal stasis, the temperature of proceedings takes a drastic turn south.

An elegant, slippery game of tonal bait-and-switch, “When Fall is Coming” finds the ever-unpredictable Ozon in mellow, pensive mode following the high-camp frippery of last year’s period caper “The Crime is Mine” and his arch Fassbinder reworking “Peter von Kant.” Playing out a narrative of increasingly high-key melodrama in a low-key register, the film steadily picks apart the bucolic idyll of Michelle’s golden years, sliding in the process from ambling character study to cool-blooded thriller in the spirit of Simenon.