La petite mort ( Little Death 1995) gay short film by François Ozon

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f2ugtzt0rIQ

Little Death (1995)

26 min|Short|N/A

6.7Rating: 6.7 / 10 from 581 usersMetascore: N/A

Family ties. Paul is an artist, his current project is to take photos of the faces of men during orgasm. He lives with Martial, his lover. His sister Camille, who’s running the family business, takes Paul to the hospital to see their father, who is dying. Paul hasn’t seen him in six years, and all his life has believed his father thinks he’s ugly and perhaps not even his child. There’s no deathbed reconciliation, but subsequent exchanges of Paul with Martial and with Camille bring opportunities for growth and change to this temperamental and self-pitying young man.

Director: François Ozon
Writer: Didier Blasco, François Ozon
Country: France
Language: French
Duration: 26 min
Stars: François Delaive, Camille Japy, Martial Jacques, Michel Beaujard

The story is at the same time hard and touching, a deep diving in the intricacies of family relationships. Very far from the kitsch-touch of some subsequent movies of Ozon. Under the provocative varnish, a drama upsetting on the relation father-son, the melancholy which presses the heart, on homosexuality and the difficulty in liking and being liked in return.This film is far from the voyeurism which one could fear with the reading of the script.

The play of François Delaive is definitively like a razor. People that like this short-movie must absolutely see “Abattoir” (“Slaughter-house”), a movie from Didier Blasco (the co-scenarist of “Petite Mort”) with the same François Delaive.