A down-and-out former pop star receives an invitation to a remote English island to perform a greatest hits concert from his time as part of an extremely successful folk duo.

A simple enough premise, and could describe anything from a comedy to a horror movie. (It resembles, e.g., The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent.)

It’s fair to call The Ballad of Wallis Island a comedy, though there’s no question the comedy is a vehicle for a poignant drama. You can only get to Wallis Island on a ferry—a guy rowing a boat a couple of times a day if he feels like it—and when Herb McGwyer arrives, he ends up dumped in the water.

He’s already grumpy: He doesn’t want to do the old music, but he needs the money to do his latest album, a series of collaborations of with other artists. Since his breakup with Nell, he’s been on the lookout for a new partnership.

Or has he just been looking for the old one?

Nell Mortimer has moved on—like, to America, where’s she’s remarried and in a struggling business with her husband. So when reclusive millionaire Charles Heath offers her some money to perform, she takes him up on it.

But Charles didn’t tell Herb that Nell was coming.

You get the setup. It’s wall-to-wall remote-island-jokes and socially-awkward-fan humor, as Charles walks Herb through his eccentric life and obsession with McGwyer/Mortimer, inflamed as it is by the death of his own wife, who shared his love of the music.

This kind of thing isn’t easy to do well: Charles has to be kind of clueless, awkward and still likable. Tim Key (as Charles) manages to be the sort of person who talks constantly about meaningless things and carries his cluelessness to the point of dishonesty, yet still be very likable.

One gag has Herb demanding to know what Charles made his money on, as he would not perform for a—I forget what, an arms dealer or slave trader or something—only to discover that Charles won the lottery. And then to find out that Charles and his buddies blew all the money on following bands around the globe on their world tours. Only to come back home and win the lottery again.

Tom Basden also has a tricky job as Herb, the prickly jerk of a musician holding a torch and a grudge over a decade, inflamed by the sense of “selling out”. He’s really the main character of the movie: His character arc is the one that powers the story and has to occur for us to feel like something good has happened.

This may be the key element of the film’s charm. Yes, it’s well written, well acted, with good music (though not all that much for a movie about a folk duo), and the characters feel like people rather than props. But it very much also doesn’t want to make you feel bad. It manages good dramatic lifts and falls without trying to submerse you in despair.

You end up rooting for everyone—except maybe Nell’s husband who turns out to be kind of superficial jerk. But even he can be viewed through an (understandable) lens of feeling threatened by the Herb & Nell romance of the past.

It never forgets the value of humor in telling a story that has a fair amount of tragedy in it (as does all life).

The ending is not “fairytale” but it’s happy. We end up feeling good about Herb and Charles, both who they are and where they’re going in life.

It’s such a simple thing, you’d think they’d make more of them. But simple isn’t the same as easy.

I know! French, right?

I thought I’d get that out of the way up front, since you know it’s coming when I review a French film. Let’s see if you can guess when I thought that phrase during this sophisticated French mystery/suspense film.

François Ozon is a director who’s been around for decades and whose movies struggle to hit 7.0 on IMDB. I’ve seen Young and Beautiful on the streaming services but never watched it, and apart from that, I’m not familiar with his oeuvre. All of this conspired to incline me against going to see his latest effort When Fall Is Coming. But it was listed as “black comedy” and since black comedies don’t tend to score well and I like them, and the premise was interesting, me and the Boy rolled them bones and caught it on its last day.

It’s not a black comedy. Not at all. Nothing is played for laughs, although it has a few organically funny moments. It’s sort of dark and moody without being heavy or a slog.

The premise is that Michelle and her friend Marie-Claude are in the forest in Burgundy gathering mushrooms, which Michelle prepares in anticipation of the arrival of her daughter and her grandson. Her daughter’s going through an ugly divorce, and she plans to leave the grandson with Michelle for his week-long vacation.

The daughter, Valérie, is what the French call “une chienne”, and takes most interactions with her mother as an opportunity to be awful. Hearing that her mother is preparing food for them—something she does with considerable love and attention—Valérie says they ate on the road. (Though that’s before they actually get there.) While eating, Valérie says Michelle should sign over the house so she’ll have fewer taxes to pay when Michelle dies.

That’s when we learn Michelle has already signed over her Paris flat.

We get the idea that Valérie is holding a grudge against her mother for something in the past.

But that’s nothing compared to the grudge she’s about to start holding, when Valérie (the only one to eat the mushrooms, after upsetting her mother) ends up nearly dying from them. After a brief hospital visit, she flees with her son vowing to never let Michelle see her grandson again.

Michelle is crushed. Meanwhile, Marie-Claude’s son, Vincent, gets out of jail and Michelle hires him to work in her garden and clean up her garage and grounds. (This house in the French countryside is pretty nice and large.) While a bit crude, Vincent is a hard worker and kind to Michelle, and since she’s kind to him back, he gets it into his head that he’s going to help her out.

He travels to Paris to see Valérie. They were childhood friends, so he thinks maybe she’ll listen to him. But no. She’s not prepare to forgive her mother for her past.

I suppose beyond this point lay spoilers, though honestly, I guessed the issue Valérie had and had figured out from the trailer how act one was going to end, but if you want to be unspoiled, venture no further.

So.

It turns out momma was a (high-priced) prostitute* back in the day, and Valérie had to deal with this growing up. (Most of the difficulty she had stemmed from being bullied at school which, I guess it’s hard for a hooker to homeschool, but it would have saved a lot of trouble.)

Vincent, curiously enough, is far more forgiving. He’s just kind of a lout.

So when Valérie dies by plummeting off her balcony, and he’s there for it, we got a sticky situation.

And this is the crux of the movie. We spend all our time getting little clues and wondering who did what to whom and why. The movie gives us enough information to speculate and teases us with a lot of leading data, but it never spells out what happened, as a suspicious (and pregnant) police captain from Paris starts sniffing around looking to resolve some of the very suspicious questions.

What makes this work, beside very good acting and a beautiful Burgundy landscape, is that we are sympathetic to all of the characters, but also suspicious of them. Did Michelle attempt to murder her daughter to with mushrooms and, failing that, hire Vincent to do the deed? Is Michelle going senile? (The movie gives moments where Michelle pauses and looks sort of blankly into space, but she’s got a lot to be troubled about.) We know Michelle is racked with guilt because she sees the accusatory ghost of her daughter, but her daughter looked that when she was alive, too.

It’s apparent at every turn that if the cops get a whiff of anything they can act on, everyone will be worse off.

There were plenty of clues, in my opinion, to resolve the mystery, but you might watch it and come up with different answers. The movie never spells it out.

You might find that frustrating. The Boy and I liked it.

* This is where I thought, “I know: French, right?” Though, as the Boy pointed out, who knew that would upset the French? I suppose the provincials are throwbacks compared to the Parisiennes.