Ricky

When Katie, an ordinary woman, meets Paco, an ordinary man, something wonderful and magical happens: they fall in love. But then, their love for each other produces an unusual baby, Ricky.
The starting point for this film was a short story by English novelist Rose Tremain. François Ozon’s screen adaptation is a ‘fantastical’ family film: “The story is very short and its mood reminded me of ROSETTA by the Dardenne brothers. The characters are poor, underprivileged white people living in a trailer park in the heart of the United States. Because of the setting, I wasn’t sure how to approach the story, how to make it mine. And although I like the way an extraordinary, amazing event disrupts the characters’ otherwise bleak existence, the fantasy element frightened me. But then I realised that what touched me about the story wasn’t so much the fantasy element as the way it talks about family, our place in it, and how a new member – a new partner or a new child – can shake up the balance. There’s an irony in Rose Tremain’s writing that corresponds to my own, and I wanted to preserve that in the film. Whenever the story gets too unreal or bizarre, elements of humour and distance come in to release the tension and make the scene work”.