François Ozon’s Quand vient l’automne (2024) is a masterful meditation on the quiet storms of aging, familial fractures, and the secrets that bind us. Set against the misty, golden landscapes of Burgundy, the film weaves a narrative as delicate and potent as the poisonous mushrooms that catalyze its drama. With a career-defining performance by Hélène Vincent as Michèle, a grandmother cloaked in genteel mystery, Ozon crafts a story where the pastoral idyll becomes a stage for moral ambiguity and existential reckoning.

The Rustic Stage: Burgundy’s Dual Nature

Burgundy, known for its vineyards and rolling hills, is reimagined here as both sanctuary and prison. Ozon’s lens lingers on the region’s autumnal beauty—crumbling stone cottages, forests carpeted in ochre leaves, and fog-laden mornings that obscure as much as they reveal. This setting mirrors Michèle’s inner world: serene on the surface, yet teeming with unresolved histories. The film opens with a mushroom-foraging scene, a nod to Burgundy’s culinary traditions, where the line between nourishment and toxicity blurs. The cèpes and girolles Michèle gathers become a metaphor for the hidden dangers lurking beneath familial harmony.

The region’s agrarian rhythms—harvest festivals, communal meals, and the cyclical decay of nature—echo the film’s themes of renewal and entropy. Ozon contrasts this with the encroaching modernity symbolized by Michèle’s estranged daughter Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier), whose urban impatience clashes with the deliberate slowness of rural life. The tension between preservation and progress is palpable, evoking France’s broader cultural anxieties about identity in a globalized world.

Family as a Web of Silence and Complicity

At its core, When Fall Is Coming is a family drama steeped in Hitchcockian suspense. Michèle’s tranquil existence is disrupted when her grandson Lucas arrives for a holiday, unwittingly stirring long-buried secrets. The arrival of Marie-Claude’s son (Pierre Lottin), a troubled ex-convict, further destabilizes the fragile equilibrium. Ozon’s script, co-written with Philippe Piazzo, unfolds like a slow-burn thriller, where dialogue is sparse but loaded with subtext.

The relationship between Michèle and Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko) is the film’s beating heart. Their camaraderie—forged over decades of shared loneliness—masks unspoken debts and betrayals. In one haunting scene, the two women share a bottle of Burgundy wine, their laughter tinged with melancholy. The camera lingers on their weathered hands, a visual testament to time’s erosion and the weight of collusion. Ozon avoids villainizing his characters; even Valérie’s resentment feels rooted in generational neglect rather than malice. The film asks: Can love survive when built on lies?

The Aesthetics of Decay: Visual and Narrative Symmetry

Ozon’s visual storytelling is as precise as ever. The palette—burnt oranges, muted greens, and the grayish-blue of impending rain—evokes autumn’s transient beauty. Interiors are cluttered with antiques and fading photographs, suggesting a life curated for nostalgia rather than truth. The recurring motif of mushrooms, both nourishing and lethal, mirrors the duality of Michèle’s actions. Did she accidentally serve toxic fungi, or was it a calculated act of defiance against a family that abandoned her to solitude? The film leaves this tantalizingly ambiguous.

The score, a sparse arrangement of piano and strings, amplifies the unease. In the film’s climax—a funeral scene under a leaden sky—the absence of music underscores the raw grief and unspoken accusations hanging in the air. Ozon’s decision to withhold catharsis feels both brutal and humane, reflecting life’s refusal to tie loose ends neatly.

Culinary Metaphors and the Politics of Nourishment

Food in When Fall Is Coming is never just sustenance. The mushroom risotto that poisons Valérie becomes a locus of guilt and retribution. Ozon juxtaposes this with scenes of rustic feasts—crusty baguettes, pungent cheeses, and stews simmering for hours—that symbolize the labor and love inherent in caregiving. Michèle’s kitchen, with its copper pots and herb-drying racks, is a sanctuary where she exerts control, a stark contrast to the chaos of her emotional life.

The film also critiques the romanticization of rural simplicity. While tourists flock to Burgundy for its terroir and quaint villages, Ozon exposes the isolation beneath the charm. Marie-Claude’s son, adrift in a world that has no use for ex-convicts, embodies the region’s silent crises—youth emigration, economic stagnation, and the erosion of communal ties.

Aging and the Illusion of Autonomy

Vincent’s performance as Michèle is a revelation. Her Michèle is a woman clinging to autonomy in a society that dismisses the elderly as relics. The camera lingers on her rituals: pruning roses, baking tarte Tatin, and meticulously setting the table for one. These acts of self-preservation are undermined by her reliance on Marie-Claude and the gnawing fear of dying unnoticed.

The film’s most devastating moment comes when Michèle, alone in her garden, swings silently on a rusted swing. The scene recalls Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, where progress tramples tradition, leaving the old to mourn in silence. Ozon refrains from sentimentalizing aging; instead, he presents it as a series of surrenders—to memory, to the body’s betrayals, and to the inevitability of being misunderstood.

Legacy and the Burden of Truth

When Fall Is Coming joins Ozon’s oeuvre of morally complex narratives (Under the Sand, 8 Women), but here the stakes feel profoundly personal. The director, now in his late 50s, seems to interrogate his own artistic legacy. The film’s title—a question without an answer—speaks to the uncertainty of endings, both in life and art.

In its final act, the film shifts focus to Lucas, whose innocence is a foil to the adults’ compromises. His declaration, “I’ve always loved mushrooms,” carries a chilling double meaning. Will he inherit the cycle of secrecy, or can he break free? Ozon offers no easy resolutions, leaving the audience to grapple with the weight of inheritance—biological, emotional, and cultural.

A Cinematic Feast for the Senses

For international audiences, When Fall Is Coming is a gateway to Burgundy’s sensory richness. The market scenes in Beaune, with their stalls of truffles and jambon persillé, evoke a France untouched by time. Yet Ozon never lets the beauty overshadow the rot beneath. A shot of mold creeping across a forgotten wheel of cheese becomes a silent allegory for decay.

The film’s pacing—deliberate, almost languid—invites viewers to savor each frame. This is not a story to be hurried; like a fine Burgundy wine, it demands patience, rewarding those willing to sit with its complexities.