Hideaway (Le refuge) (2010)

Two drug addicts have a baby but the father dies from overdose. This is before the birth of the baby.The mother manages to get help from someone who provides her a house in a village. She meets a friend, and then later, a one-night stand lover.The mother abandons the baby to the friend. Hopefully this friend will be a good parent, so she can find herself (get high?).We can predict the baby will likely become a future drug addict, lacking in responsibility, like his parents.This movie shows why a nanny-state nation degrades over time - dependency and irresponsibility are fostered by the nanny-state.Many viewers may be emotionally moved by the sad state of affairs depicted in "Hideway", but I see a situation that could have been prevented by a culture that encouraged less dependency and more responsibility in its citizens.

By the time this movie rose to the top of my queue I had totally forgotten how it ever got on my queue and had no idea what it was about. I think this turned out to be fortuitous, since from the very beginning you never know quite where the story is going. Not wanting to spoil the effect for those who come to this cold as I did, I will only say that the main character, name Mousse, is a woman of shifting moods and a woman who remains somewhat mysterious. There are men in her life, but the relationships are not predictable.The filming is interesting. A lot of the movie takes place in the night and I found myself turning up the brightness on my TV to make out some of the scenes. Also, a lot of the scenes are back-lit, or are taken from a darkened room with a doorway or window opening onto bright sunlight. On the other hand there are many scenes filmed outdoors in brilliant sunlight. I could never figure out if this was strictly a director's stylistic technique, or whether the contrasts in light and dark were to reflect Mousse's mood shifts.Some may find the pacing rather too measured, but I found this film to be a satisfying character study. I came away with a renewed appreciation for the near infinite variety of human experiences.

The junkie atmosphere versus the bourgeois milieu the first sequences conjure up could lead the director into numbing Chabrol territory,but finally Ozon's innate narration sense keeps the film simple and direct.Chabrol's fans will probably notice the similarities between the beginnings of "Le Refuge " and "La Rupture" (1970):in both movies ,the young man of means runs away with a girl who comes from a much modest family ,then there's a bad trip;and the way the "mother-in-law" treats the girl recalls that of Michel Bouquet in the 1970 effort.When lil' brother comes to visit Mousse,we may fear a rehash of Irish's "I married a dead man" (filmed as "no man of her own" "J'ai Epouse Une Ombre" and "Mrs Winterbourne" ) but fortunately it is not : lil' brother is gay (the gay -or the lesbian- we find in every movie Ozon has made)and moreover ,he 's some kind of black sheep of the family (one sentence the mom said at the beginning is revealing "it's not him who should have died!" ;we only understand it halfway through the movie).That said ,and although the ending makes sense ,there's a tendency in the director's recent work to rest on his laurels .One sees little in "Le Refuge" of the taste for danger he displayed in earlier works such as "Sitcom" "Gouttes D'Eau Sur Pierres Brûlantes" or "Les Amants Criminels"

It's quite difficult to summarise what Le Refuge is about, there is a plot, it's linear, and quite simple, but there's nothing really generic in content, and it's not particularly dramatic either. Couldn't really call it anything other than an "emotion painting", beautifully shot, and well performed. The characters in the film are rather unlikeable, Mousse (Isabelle Carré) is a charismatic kidult heroin addict with a sharp tongue and propensity to sexual jealousy, unflappable Paul who somehow gets entangled with Mousse, has no sympathy with his brother's pained life and subsequent death. The background of high affluence that these two come from seems to be a seething psychological vipers nest from a wet dream of Freud.The story regards Mousse who manages to survive her lover when they both tuck into a bad batch of heroin. She is pregnant and now on methadone, taking refuge at the coast in an acquaintance's deserted property. The extremely handsome and gay Paul (the brother of her lover) turns up, but is full of sangfroid to the gills and becomes an object of unattainable lust for Mousse.One might say that the film is an unhaloed look at pregnancy. Mousse is fine with drinking alcohol and methadone for two, the film also looks at the erotic potential of the pregnant woman, as Mousse is propositioned by various men, and throughout she is quite unsentimental, as if she were a paid surrogate. I think that the camera-eye is not altogether disapproving, there is perhaps a feeling that in modern times preparations for a baby are preparations as if for the visit of a little emperor, with all the concomitant Freudian backlash.It feels a little dirty sometimes that there are questions that only the viewer of the film knows the answer to, as opposed to the characters. The characters are left to wonder why, for example, did Louis die and Mousse survive? I think as well that there are things left to the viewer's imagination, for example the story of Louis and Paul's parents, which begs a whole film in itself; there's a kind of pendulosity to the suggestions there that really make the film feel like a masterpiece.Visually I think there are some nice touches, this is the first time Ozon has filmed in digital, and he and the DP were playing around here. There's a psychological resonance when Mousse is at the beach on a bright summer day and a scene is played out with grafittoed breakwaters in the background that scream hazard as the water smashes into them. There's also a lovely shot at the beginning where a coruscating river reflects off a glass-fronted building.It's ultimately an extremely winsome tale of fallible characters. I think the fallibility is extremely well portrayed, these characters are fallible just like pretty much everyone who'll be watching the film. So I give the film a lot of points for humanity, as well as, by the way, for not having an ounce of fat at 88 minutes.For more excellent acting from Isabelle Carré in a "bad woman" role, you could do worse than watch Anna M. A note as well that this film could as seen a return to the aesthetics of Ozon's 52 minute thriller Regarde la mer, also about a disquieting movie starring a mother figure who frequents the French beaches.