General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Time to Leave

Time to Leave (French: Le Temps qui reste) is a 2005 French drama directed and written by François Ozon, in which Romain, a 30-year-old fashion photographer, learns that he has only a few months to live and decides how to spend the time remaining to him.¹ The film was selected in the Un Certain Regard section of the 2005 Cannes Film Festival and opened in France on 30 November 2005.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	François Ozon, his first solo screenplay since Sitcom (1998)¹^•³
Festival	Un Certain Regard selection, Cannes 2005¹
Lead cast	Melvil Poupaud (Romain), Jeanne Moreau (Laura), Valeria Bruni Tedeschi (Jany), Daniel Duval, Marie Rivière, Christian Sengewald¹
French release	30 November 2005, with international releases through mid-2006²
Production	Fidélité Films and StudioCanal, produced by Olivier Delbosc and Marc Missonnier²
Music	Arvo Pärt⁴
Reception	74% on Rotten Tomatoes (54 reviews), Metascore 67, US gross $117.6K⁵^•⁶

Spoilers

Plot

Romain (Melvil Poupaud), a successful and vain young photographer, collapses during a photo shoot and is diagnosed with a virtually inoperable brain tumor.⁵ He refuses treatment and tells no one of the prognosis, not even his partner Sasha (Christian Sengewald), from whom he recoils, leaving his family and boyfriend unprepared for his death.⁵^•⁷ The one person he confides in is his grandmother Laura (Jeanne Moreau), who is herself near the end of her life and encourages him to reexamine himself before he departs.⁵^•⁸ Romain then meets Jany (Valeria Bruni Tedeschi), a waitress in a roadside café who is in a childless marriage, and she offers him a surprising opportunity to die meaningfully: he agrees to father her child.⁵^•⁸

Ozon described his protagonist's choice in a festival program note: Romain "makes a conscious decision to embrace his solitude and answer only to himself," and the director asked why he should not have the right to choose how he will die.⁷

Origins and place in Ozon's work

A personal starting point. Ozon said the idea began germinating just after Sous le sable (Under the Sand, 2001). Since that film dealt with mourning for another person, he wanted to explore a different question: can one mourn one's own life? While awaiting the results of his own medical examinations the following year, he imagined the worst; the results were fine, but the scenario stayed with him.³ He consulted doctors to determine the illness, wanting certainty that the character would die, and chose cancer; he also decided the film should end in great gentleness, with the character capable of smiling at the end.³

According to Ozon, the film can be seen as the second installment of a trilogy on mourning begun with Sous le sable; scholars have made the same connection, with Emma Wilson's Film Quarterly essay describing it as the second film in a proposed trilogy about mourning.⁹^•¹⁰ It was also, for the first time in his feature work, built around a male protagonist. Ozon explained that he had been dissatisfied with the couple dynamic in his previous film 5x2, where he had favored the female character, so he resolved to look at a male character from beginning to end and learn to like him.³ He wrote the screenplay alone, without showing it to his usual collaborators Marina De Van or Emmanuèle Bernheim, and treated Melvil Poupaud as a kind of co-screenwriter, reading him the successive drafts.³

The look. Ozon chose the cinematographer Jeanne Lapoirie and said he wanted a feminine gaze on Melvil Poupaud and lighting that showed off his beauty, a choice that scholars have read as queering the film's look at its male star.¹¹

Production and release

The film was produced by Fidélité Films (credited on some records as Fidélité Productions) with StudioCanal and France 2 Cinéma, and sold internationally by Celluloid Dreams.²^•¹ It premiered in the Un Certain Regard section at Cannes in May 2005.¹ France, Belgium, and the Netherlands received it in late November 2005, followed through 2006 by Spain, Poland, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Sweden, the United Kingdom, Hungary, and Italy.² Listed running times differ by source: 85 minutes in the Cannes catalog, 80 minutes on Cineuropa, and 1 hour 20 minutes on Apple TV and Rotten Tomatoes.¹^•²^•⁵ In the United States it was distributed by Strand Releasing, with a theatrical re-release date of July 14, 2006 recorded by Rotten Tomatoes.⁵

Reception

Critical response. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds 74% from 54 reviews, and its Metacritic Metascore is 67, labeled generally favorable.⁵^•⁶ French press reviews compiled by AlloCiné gave an average rating of 4.1 out of 5 across 28 publications.¹² Reviewers repeatedly noted the film's restraint. David Ansen of Newsweek called it the most personal, deeply felt film from the director of Under the Sand and Swimming Pool, saying Ozon leaches his melodrama of sentimentality; the Seattle Times found it a quiet, poignant look at a life slipping away through a character who is not always likable but remains entirely real.⁵ The Busan festival program called it Ozon's most linear, accessible, and sentimental film, noting that viewers expecting the bite of 5x2 or the irony of 8 Women would find pathos instead.⁷ Dissenting voices existed: Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian rated it 2 out of 5, and Le Monde's critic found the accumulation of delicate scenes lacking emotion.¹³^•¹² Critics singled out Poupaud's performance in a complex, deeply unsympathetic role, and Moreau's scenes as the grandmother.⁶

Awards and box office. The film received one nomination at the Cannes Film Festival and, per Metacritic's awards listing, two wins and three nominations at the Valladolid International Film Festival.⁶ Its US gross was $117.6K.⁵

Themes and interpretation

The film's treatment of terminal illness departs from the Hollywood weepie model; one American critic described it as the French antidote to films in which the heroine faces mortality with every hair in place, and another called it an oddly dispassionate film that subordinates narrative to mood.⁶ French critics highlighted the secret shared between spectator and protagonist, a secular, modest, solitary face-to-face with death, and the film's refusal of medical folklore and tearful pathos.¹² Scholarly discussion has focused on how the film blurs distinctions between dream and reality, memory and fantasy, love and trauma in its portrait of a dying gay photographer's last days.¹⁰ The final sequences take place at a seaside resort, a setting Ozon also used at the end of 5x2.¹⁴

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Drama and biographical films (individual works) › Drama films 2000s › Biographical and historical drama films 2000s › Released 2000 to 2005

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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