Pregnant pause: "Le Refuge"

The majority of François Ozon's chamber pieces - his feature debut Sitcom, kitschy musicals Water Drops on Burning Rocks and 8 Women, the period adaptation Angel - have been stylised, deliberately provocative, and to a greater or lesser degree insincere. Like his backwards divorce drama 5x2 or his AIDS pic Time to Leave, the director's latest Le Refuge appears rather more heartfelt, perhaps inspired by contact with the disenfranchised of this world. The first of the film's two primary hideaways is an empty flat turned into a drug den by rich, addled dropout Louis (Melvil Poupaud) and his working-class girlfriend Mousse (Isabelle Carré). Their grim existence alters forever upon receipt of a batch of heroin cut with a lethal dose of valium; in a grimly comic scene worthy of the Ozon of old - a filmmaker who knew the importance of interior decoration to a property's value - Louis' mother, whom we gather owns the flat, begins to show a prospective buyer around the place, only to find her son's overdosed corpse lying in wait in the bedroom. (Suffice to say: no sale.)

The focus then shifts to Mousse, after she discovers she's pregnant, as Carré in fact was during filming. Undergoing treatment for her addiction, she's swiftly cut off by Louis's family, who'd rather she abort the child, so as not to have any painful reminders of their son toddling about. Mousse, however, has other ideas. She takes off for the coast, allowing Ozon to indulge his seashore fetish, and his heroine to hole up in a cottage with the deceased's gay brother to mull over the weird existential paradox she's struck by: that though both lovers took the same drug, Louis died, and she (and the couple's offspring) survived.

There is, it should be noted, a lot of mulling here - it's a film of stillness and reflection, where Ozon's previous films (the intentionally florid Angel, especially) were mannered and frenetic - and we have time of our own to reflect upon such things as Ozon's oddly token and surfacey gay relationships. The brother (Louis-Ronan Choisy) bumps into the only other gay man in the village, and the two spend the rest of the film ruffling one another's hair on the beach, a courtship interrupted only by a hetero sex scene that's likely to be the immediate post-credit talking point, and is possibly almost as preposterous as all the lesbian-converting business in Gigli.

Overstretched even at 90 minutes, Le Refuge is another film-mini, the default setting for certain French auteurs at the moment, and perhaps in no other country in the world would name directors elicit funding to explore such gossamer-thin ideas - to be allowed, in effect, to turn out anecdotes rather than features. Nevertheless, it happens across at least one subtly powerful sight along its meandering clifftop path: that of a woman trying to reconnect with the world - with her body, with her sexuality, with the people around her - in the wake of a sudden, gamechanging rupture; giving herself nine months, in effect, to work out what, exactly, the new life inside her represents. It's another fine, transformative performance from the still underrated (perhaps because so little seen over here) Carré, who - like her namesake Ms. Huppert - has become expert at portraying women whose seemingly delicate exteriors conceal contradictory impulses, and vast, unforeseeable cores of inner strength.

Le Refuge opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.