Family ties and the isolation of generations

Review: When Fall is Coming (104 minutes)

Michelle (Helene Vincent) is a retired sex worker living in the French campagne, in a little Burgundy village four hours’ drive from Paris, where her daughter Valérie and grandson Lucas live.

Together with her close friend and former colleague Marie-Claude (Josiane Balasko), she goes on a mushroom picking trip to welcome Valérie (Ludivine Sagnier) and Lucas (Paul Beaurepaire), who are coming to spend a full week with her.

But things quickly deteriorate when Valérie is poisoned by a mistakenly picked mushroom and is taken to the hospital. Valérie, selfish and delusional, tries to link it to her mother’s non-existing cognitive decline, but also accuses her of doing it deliberately. On the same day they arrive, she takes Lucas back to Paris, claiming he is not safe there.

Michelle’s desolation defines the beginning of Quand vient l’automne (2024), a film that competed for the Golden Shell in the San Sebastian International Film Festival and won awards for Best Screenplay (by François Ozon and Philippe Piazzo) and Best Supporting Performance for Pierre Lottin.

Director Ozon hits the audience with a wave of raw empathy in the first 20 minutes of the film. You will be Michelle, and you will feel what it’s like to have eagerly anticipated a week’s vacation with your grandson, only to wake up in an empty house the following morning.

It talks about the pain of loneliness, the importance of forgiving others even when you have reasons not to, and about not letting that punishing voice inside you destroy the happiness that comes to you.

This film is a social cry that denounces the (frequently imposed) loneliness that many elderly people suffer in modern societies. While the issue of social isolation has been shown to be rapidly escalating across all age groups, older individuals are particularly vulnerable. In response to this societal trend, many governments throughout the globe have begun taking administrative action.

From the United Kingdom, the first country to establish a Minister for Loneliness in 2018, to the creation of Japan’s Ministry of Loneliness in 2021 — formed in response to the exacerbation of the COVID-induced isolation — legislative action has also commenced in Australia. In New South Wales, a Parliamentary Inquiry into Loneliness and Social Isolation began in 2021, leading to recommendations to address the problem on both state and federal levels.

Luckily for Michelle, her close bond to Marie-Claude keeps her safe from that abyss. At this point, the prominence of nourishing deep connections throughout one’s life cannot be overlooked by the audience.

Meanwhile, things take another turn when Marie-Claude’s son Vincent (Lottin) is released from prison and Valérie suffers an accident in her Paris flat. Once the screenplay’s initial course corrections settle down, the film submerges into a beautiful story of the new family structure. Michelle, with the help of Marie-Claude and her son will have to raise Lucas amid the stigma of prostitution, and more importantly, the need to believe the people around you.

The director sometimes resorts to the materialisation of Michelle’s thoughts to reflect the internal clash between her “willing self” and her self-sabotaging self. The latter will try to distort her well-intended acts to the point of questioning her underlying motivations, a torture she must fight against at different points of the story.

Quand vient l’automne is a movie with no single message. It talks about the pain of loneliness, the importance of forgiving others even when you have reasons not to, and about not letting that punishing voice inside you destroy the happiness that comes to you.