What to Expect When You're Waking Up Pregnant from a Heroin Bender
by Benjamin Strong
An offbeat drama about a woman knocked up, filmed while its lead actress was herself preggers, Hideaway, François Ozon's typically idiosyncratic new feature, concerns a young Parisienne named Mousse (Isabelle Carré), who is utterly nonchalant about, even indifferent to, the child growing inside her.
Mousse learns she's got one in the oven only after awakening in a hospital from a coma having survived the heroin bender that killed her boyfriend. Hideaway (Le refuge is the original title) takes place during the summer weeks late in her term when Mousse, staying by herself at her parent's beach house, receives a visit from Paul, her dead lover's brother (played by Francophone pop chanteur Louis-Ronan Choisy). Naturally, the two develop a friendship, but Paul, younger and for obvious reasons less encumbered, still indulges in the nightlife Mousse needs to give up.
Hideaway's gimmick is not unprecedented—Demi Moore was carrying Rumer during the filming of 1988's otherwise forgettable The Seventh Sign, for starters—but as on-screen expectant mothers go, Carré's performance is. Ozon, shooting in rich saturated HD for the first time, encourages us to take in the actress's lovely distended belly, her rounded face, her appealingly swollen feet. And we're not alone in our admiration—to Mousse's annoyance, strangers keep approaching her to tell her how beautiful she looks, and in one case to pick her up. Ozon has consciously objectified his protagonist, but it's to remind us that she's unknowable, that we don't really understand what's going on inside her head.
Opens September 10
