This is the first full-length study of the films of François Ozon, director of such diverse films as 8 femmes, Swimming Pool, 5x2 and Les amants criminels. Andrew Asibong's passionate and critical analysis focuses on the extent to which Ozon's seemingly light touch never ceases to engage with the fundamentally weighty issue of existential transformation, a transformation that affects of both his protagonists and his audiences.
A central question emerges: what is at stake, cinematically, ethically and politically, in Ozon's alternatively utopian and cynical flirtation with the construction and deconstruction of contemporary social relations.
Revealing Ozon as a highly adept 'fan' of a whole range of thought, literature and cinema, Asibong places the precocious French auteur in an intellectual yet highly accessible critical framework, allowing Ozon's importance for a thoroughly postmodern filmgoing generation to be given the attention it deserves.

Andrew Asibong is Reader in Film and Cultural Studies at Birkbeck, University of London

List of plates
Series editors' foreword
Acknowledgments
Family film-maker: an introduction to François Ozon
1. Desire unlimited: sexualities on the move?
2. Master and servant: society, spectacle and sadomasochistic cinema
3. Shadow of the spectre: cinema beyond relation?
4. Blood, tears and song: genre and the shock of over-stimulation
A drop in the ocean: concluding remarks
Filmography
Select bibliography
Index