When he discovers out of the blue that he has terminal cancer and only a few months left to live, Romain (Melvil Poupard), a fashion photographer, reacts by going out of his way to be unpleasant to those close to him. He is vile to his sister and ditches his lover. He roams around taking photographs - a keepsake for what, or whom? - and seeing fleeting images of himself as a beautiful child like a ghost passing in and out of his world. The official English title is, for some reason, Time To Go, rather than a straight translation - The Time That's Left - which seems a more appropriate summing up of Romain's use of the short time that is suddenly all he has.

He keeps the truth to himself, telling only his grandmother, played by Jeanne Moreau, on a visit to her idyllic cottage, a place of happy childhood memories. Ozon has made a habit of getting female screen icons to appear for him - 8 Women is just awash with them, and here he's bagged the greatest of them all - Moreau, her face always more charismatic than classically beautiful, and now more interesting, ravaged even, by age, yet still so fascinating that your eyes can't leave her. She's the best thing in the film, and the scenes between her and Romain are the most convincing and touching. Meanwhile a chance encounter with waitress Jany (out of all the roadside cafes in all the world, he has to walk into hers...) played by Valeria Bruni-Tedeschi with what is becoming her signature touch of a combination of the beautiful and mysterious with the ordinary, brings an unexpected possibility.

There are many good things about this film. It's perfectly made and acted, Melvil Poupard, almost an omnipresent, moving convincingly from the well-groomed confident young professional to unkempt ordinariness, but always beautiful. It's at times affecting, particularly the final scene amongst the homely bucket and spade world of the seaside. In fact I would say its moments of stillness while the world goes by - on the beach, sitting in the hospital gardens taking in the news, are the only times we do get the required feeling of the preciousness of life, and what it may be like to be faced with the imminence of death.

But really as a whole it just won't do. I was put in mind of an unpretentious little film of about 2 years ago, My Life Without Me, in which Sarah Polley played a young blue-collar mother who finds herself in the same situation, which triumphantly managed to keep on the right side of sentimentality, while being very affecting. Here we don't just verge on the sentimental, we reach the tipping point and well and truly tip, particularly in those glimpses of Romain's impossibly cute younger self. The whole Jany situation is an unacceptably implausible plot advancer, sex scenes are portentous and arty, and the final scene on the beach is a very obvious re-enactment of the close of Death in Venice. Ozon seems to like sunset finales - in 5x2 he used it as an ironic symbol of what the future might hold, but here, while undeniably beautiful, it is in the end a cliché.