Ricky is a unique and endearing love story, but also odd and uneven. And it’s not odd and uneven because it features a human baby with angel wings, but rather because it feels like writer and director Francois Ozon slapped two different movies together to form the one I just watched.
The film opens showing single mother Katie and her young daughter getting ready for their day. One has finished taking a shower and the other undresses to go take one herself. In the nudity Ozon presents in this scene, showing both daughter and mother comfortably naked in front of each other without Ozon making it exploitation, he seems to want to set us up for a realistic, unadorned and unrestricted portrait of these characters.
He continues on in this vein when he shows Katie dropping her daughter off at school and then heading to work in a factory where she spots a new male fellow employee. The way she immediately grows smitten with him is calculated to come off real, with all the nuances of this budding love affair brought to life in how she and the man, Paco, interact as they exchange a few words over cigarettes and then finally, that very day, hook up in a bathroom stall.
After she does the deed with Paco, she hurries flustered back to her work and even gets reprimanded for being late. She tells Paco later she regrets what she’d done, not wanting to appear easy, and promises she’d never done anything like that before. As I said, real. As real as an Antonioni or Cassavetes film.
As the film progresses, and Katie and Paco move in together and have a baby named Ricky, that strong sense of realism is still set in place by Ozon. Paco loves his baby son, but when he’s stationed at home to care for him he’s far from a perfect father; he is a bit negligent, bit impatient, but in the end yes he loves him and tries his best. When Katie begins to notice bruises on the baby’s shoulder blades, she accuses Paco of mistreating him. Paco thinks perhaps he accidently bumped Ricky when he was setting him down in his crib. But when the bruises worsen, and the accusations intensify, Paco leaves his family in anger.
This is the film thus far, and there are no flying babies as of yet. But the introduction of a baby who grows angel wings is not the problem in this film. It’s how the family reacts to it that is unusual, that creates a tone not yet established in this film, a tone more prevalent in a Tim Burton film like Edward Scissorhands, in which a man with scissors for fingers hardly incites shock from the townspeople. But in that film it works because Burton has set the tone for such a reaction from the very beginning, whereas Ozon decides mid-way into his film to shift gears and make Ricky more whimsical, and in turn sacrificing that bleak realism he’d set into place from the first minute. As the baby’s bruises grow into lumps, Katie in this period of the film is nothing like the Katie from the earlier portion. This new Katie never seems particularly horrified that her little baby has two growths on his back that could be any number of serious medical concerns. When those lumps grow into things resembling uncooked chicken wings, she decides what she should do is measure them daily instead of bring him to a doctor, and that doesn’t ring true. And even if you’re supposed to accept that she’s afraid of the endless probing doctors would perform on Ricky, you have to ask yourself where’s her initial heart-stopping shock towards this awful aberration, when earlier the film shows her obvious concern for matter’s less horrifying – like her daughter’s safety when riding on the back of a moped; or her dignity for so quickly having intercourse with Paco.
The film turns into a fairy tale, and its driving power wanes. The ending of the film, however, is still oddly effective and mystifying (in a good way), when this winged baby brings the family closer in a way that is not easy to explain, which I think is the magic and poetry of the flawed Ricky. Still, by the time this happens, it’s happening to a whole new troupe of characters with the same names, and I can’t help but miss the ones I met earlier in the film, when Ricky seemed like another movie.
"Ricky" is on sale April 12, 2011 and is not rated. Drama, Fantasy. Written and directed by Francois Ozon. Starring Alexandra Lamy, Melusine Mayance, Sergi Lopez.
