Two lives transformed
A woman dies at the outset of François Ozon’s new movie, Une nouvelle amie. In a reverential montage, we see her body being made up and dressed for the funeral, at which we hear stories of Laura’s (Isild Le Besco) pivotal role in the lives of her best friend, Claire (Anaïs Demoustier), and Laura’s husband, David (Romain Duris).
But it is another woman who will fill Claire and David’s world with a renewed sense of purpose, and a secret bond.
Claire meets Virginia quite by accident, dropping in on David and his newborn in the week following the funeral only to find him dressed up in his dead wife’s clothing.
Incensed, Claire calls David a pervert and threatens to leave, before he calms her down. Laura was aware of his fetish, David explains, and was fine with it so long as he didn’t engage in it outside the house.
What happens behind closed doors is a running theme in Ozon’s work, notably his 2012 intrigue Dans la maison, in which a teenage boy goes to great lengths to infiltrate a classmate’s home.
In 2013’s Jeune et jolie, he focused on a teenage girl moonlighting as a prostitute.
David’s secret is the driving force of Une nouvelle amie. Following her initial visit, Claire returns home aflutter. She then lies to her husband about where she has been, saying she was catching up with an old friend from college; and she changes David’s contact information in her phone so that it reads “Virginia.”
Claire and Virginia become increasingly adventurous — first embarking on a daytime excursion to the mall, then a weekend in the country.
Pascal Marti’s sparkling cinematography provides a lush, luscious esthetic to Ozon’s sensuous tale of deceit.
Duris offers a delectable performance, emanating pure joy as he becomes Virginia, while Demoustier carries the film as an innocent girl enthralled by this new world of temptation and transgression.
Une nouvelle amie works because the story is as much about Claire’s transformation as David’s. And one can’t help but get pulled in as the two venture together into the unknown.
Ozon adapted the screenplay from a 1985 short story by Ruth Rendell. He does stumble in the film’s final act, getting caught trying to wrap up too many dangling plot lines. In the process, we lose the dramatic thrust that powers the first two-thirds of this engaging tale.
It’s not enough to dampen the film’s mischievous spirit, however. The closing shot is the perfect punchline to this delightfully irreverent affair.