Lassoed with a malignant tumor at the film’s outset, Romain, the 30-something too-good-looking nub of Time to Leave, initially goes for haute calm in the face of death: Meeting with a doctor, after collapsing on a photoshoot, there’s a glint of expectation as he inquires, “Is it AIDS?” – as if, under the brim of gay fatalism, disease was simply another lauded accessory. But despite the kid’s composure soon giving way, Ozon’s encounter with his self-hatred remains surprisingly by-the-book: For every sideswipe with nihilism incurred, liability is safely pillowed by the fact that, well... the dude’s dying. So basically, this is like Blow-Up in reverse, where all the metaphysical unrest has been internalized. Which means the obvious problem becomes not who died but how to die – or live, rather, with such a drastically shortened lifespan. Unfortunately, for Ozon, the answer to that question comes all too easily, as a blend of biblical Samaratism and new-age sex therapy; bullied into doing Right, Romain re-makes the deathbed he lies in, only to find it eagerly co-opted by a married couple.

As a study of the human psyche facing certain termination, Time to Leave belongs to the same universe as 5x2. But whereas that film found something specific and hurtful in its study of a relationship lost in time’s blender, the new one fails to leech the humanity from its symbolic corpse. In fact, given that much of Romain’s struggle amounts to darting vitcim-status, Ozon’s format seems entirely counter-intuitive: Telescoping things to a scant 80-minutes, he creates a roaming “mood portrait” where the character is puppeteered through various after-the-fact scenarios. Lost in a wasteland of annihilating double-binds, Romain becomes a shadow of his condition – conjured solely to die –, while at the same time, it becomes impossible to see that condition as anything other than a symbol of all transience. Nevertheless, given his defunct everyman-ness, Romain’s response to his final moments on film is typical Ozon: Casually ditching his cellphone, he decides to spend the day at the beach.—David Levinson