Angel delight

The director François Ozon is in a funny place right now. No, not the London hotel bar where he is occupying a darkened corner and holding court on the subject of Angel, his ninth movie in ten years.

I'm referring to his career. At 41, Ozon is snagged between the enfant terrible status that he occupied around the time of his 1998 debut Sitcom and... well, what, exactly? It's hard to say.

He has never knowingly compromised — he rebuffed the Hollywood studios whose interest in Angel was predicated on changing the downbeat ending. ("I would not have final cut in Hollywood," he says. "In France, a director must have final cut. It's the law.") And he tells me that after he enjoyed blockbuster-level success at home with the musical-whodunit 8 Women, his producer badgered him to make 8 Women II and III - or 16 Women and 24 Women as they might have been called.

Did the producer in question not glance through Ozon's back catalogue? This is a director defined by his eclectic choice of subjects and styles, his refusal to repeat himself. Here's an example. His last film, Time to Leave, was an intelligent, weirdly sexy weepie. Angel is a period piece, a heightened melodrama. And he describes his next movie, Ricky, which he is currently editing, as "very strange. It's realistic but it has special effects. It's a mix between Cronenberg and — I don't know what—um... the Dardenne brothers!"

But despite such consistently adventurous work, Ozon hasn't yet had the kind of international breakthrough hit that unlocked and broadened the appeal of comparable directors like Pedro Almodóvar or Todd Haynes.

Perhaps the problem is that there's no keeping up with him. He can seem like a one-man series of Stars In Their Eyes: Tonight, Matthew, he is going to be Polanski (Regarde la mer), Bunuel (Sitcom), Fassbinder (Water Drops on Burning Rocks), Chabrol (Swimming Pool) or maybe Douglas Sirk, Vincente Minnelli and Jacques Demy all at the same time (8 Women). These pictures are witty, visually stylish and multi-textured, shot through with Ozon's breezy sensibility.

Occasionally he has even dropped the mask and revealed himself as a master of his own making, the best example being Under the Sand, a disconcerting psychological drama starring Charlotte Rampling as a woman whose husband strolls into the sea one morning and simply disappears. The late Ingmar Bergman called it a "masterpiece" and admitted to watching it on a regular basis — the sort of praise that makes a mockery of any five-star review, any Oscar.

That was eight years ago. In recent times, Ozon's sometimes frivolous work has returned to the sobriety of Under the Sand, addressing sombre matters like marital breakdown (5x2 — to my mind, his one outright failure) or terminal illness (Time to Leave). I break it to him that, in the UK at least, the consensus is that he is becoming respectable.

"Ah, do you think so?" he chuckles. Well, I explain, he used to be considered rather naughty."Naughty in a bad way?"No, naughty in an Almodóvar way."But now, you see, I am getting old."

The only physical sign that this boyish-looking Parisian has aged since we first met in 1998 is his current get-up: the white shirt, black jacket and blue jeans ripped at one knee are now topped off with a pale blue scarf wrapped around his neck and flung theatrically over one shoulder. Either he's going for that Dirk Bogarde look from the collar up, or he has the mother of all hickeys.

Angel is a return to the provocative Ozon of yore — the man who included a gratuitous shot of an erect penis in Sitcom just for the hell of it, or turned fairy-tale convention inside-out in Criminal Lovers by having the Hansel character spurn his Gretel for the bed of the grizzled woodcutter who had imprisoned them both. Based on the 1957 novel The Real Life of Angel Deverell by Elizabeth Taylor (no, not that one), Angel is a brash, deliberately overcooked film tracing the speedy rise of a self-absorbed young novelist (Romola Garai) in early-20th century England.

One of the fascinating things about Angel Deverell is that, like the crime novelist in Swimming Pool, she actually isn't much cop as a writer. "No, she is not good," admits Ozon. "But it is easier to show someone who is not a genius, a bad painter rather than a Picasso. For me, it's not important that Angel is a poor writer. What's important is her energy, her will, her strength. I think Angel has a gift but her problem is she becomes popular when she is too young. It happens all the time. Barbara Cartland was a success with this shit that she writes, and she never changed. Maybe if she'd been a big flop she would have become Emily Brontë." He laughs at the idea. "Maybe not."

Some reviewers have missed the point of the film by a good country mile, taking Garai to task for being shrill and obnoxious — exactly how the character is supposed to come off — or bemoaning the dodgy back-projection which provides a deliberate throwback to filmmaking of the 40s and 50s. Angel is as much a commentary on the genre of the costume drama and the prestigious literary adaptation as it is a film of Elizabeth Taylor's novel. Its exaggerated artificiality marks it out as a movie about cinema in the vein of Far From Heaven, The Good German or Ozon's earlier 8 Women.

The director tells me he was approached by a young man after an advance screening of the movie. "He asked me, 'Is it because your film is low-budget that all your special effects are so bad?' I said, 'It's a choice! It's to explain the disconnectedness of the characters.' Some people don't understand that. They haven't seen those old films which look like that; they are used to Harry Potter and The Lord of the Rings, where the effects are perfect. I realized at that point my film was complex. Before that, I thought it was mainstream. Maybe it's mainstream for people who are 60 years old, or for gay men. I don't know. If you don't have that perspective, maybe it seems too strange, too perverse. When I make a film, I always assume the audience is clever."

He says he was never concerned that audiences would find Angel herself completely monstrous. "Oh, but she is a monster!" he hoots. "That's why I like her. I love monsters. I know everyone won't like her. But for me, she's very touching. I think Romola is so clever. She understood the part completely. She said, 'Angel is a character. She's acting her life.' We are all acting, but with Angel it's more extreme."

Ozon has remarked before that what he experiences when he directs actresses is something like falling in love. I wonder whether, as an openly gay director, the same thing ever happens with his male performers. "Not often," he says. "With Melvil Poupaud [who played a photographer dying of cancer in Time to Leave], I felt like he was an actress. He was very easy to work with, as was Michael Fassbender [in Angel]. They had no problem being directed by a man." And some actors do? "Many, many men have that problem. They can't accept their feminine side. It becomes this big fight, and sometimes it's boring — I want to work, not fight."

Actresses began throwing themselves at Ozon after witnessing the magic he worked with Charlotte Rampling in Under the Sand. And he has served them well — the likes of Rampling (who returned in Swimming Pool and now Angel), Isabelle Huppert, Ludivine Sagnier, Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi and now Garai all have good cause to keep a special Batphone-style emergency line open for the next time Ozon writes another part for them. There is a sense too that these roles are surrogate versions of himself.

Let's face it, his CV is not exactly short on self-portraiture. He has admitted to shades of autobiography in both the middle-aged bully and his masochistic toy-boy in Water Drops on Burning Rocks, in the young, pyjama-clad manipulator in 8 Women, the writer in Swimming Pool and even the rat in Sitcom. In the same category is Victor, a saucy early short about a teenager who kills his parents and props up their corpses on the garden swings. Job done, he pleasures himself on the lawn and forms the third point in a sweaty threesome with the maid and her tattooed boyfriend.

"Victor was a film about my adolescence," he says before rushing to clarify. "It was a dream of me. I didn't actually kill my parents — only in the film." So where are the overlaps between François Ozon and Angel Deverell? "I recognise myself in her as this child living in her dreams. For me as a child my strength, my way to survive difficulties, was to have a big imagination. But that is the only similarity. When you are successful there is a temptation to become a diva. And when I am being applauded, I am not like Angel: I don't get swept along in it. I just wonder, 'What am I doing here?'"

• Angel is released on 29 August.