Feature

In the House Review

Clever adaptation peeks into the art of curiosity.

Source: SBS Movies

In the House (Dans la maison), the crafty new psychological thriller from François Ozon, is a game of a movie. Set in a delicately lit Never Neverland of bourgeois suburbia that resembles nothing less than, well, a neatly appointed French art house movie, Ozon has written an intricate script adapted from The Boy in the Last Row by Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga that toys and teases relentlessly.

it has that delicious sense of a story that can go anywhere

It’s a playful film, abounding with so many literary in-jokes and film 'quotes’ that it makes Tarantino’s slavish po-mo trainspotting look coy. Still, that comparison is perhaps unfair and beside the point. Ozon’s quotations from art and cinema are not empty ironic alibis in search of a target. Indeed, this is a film about story and storytelling. But I’m making it sound precious. It is not. It’s fun. What’s best about it is that it has that delicious sense of a story that can go anywhere. But the joy in Ozon’s skill with camera and narrative, his taste for grotesque comedy and outright naughtiness is confounded here by something a bit more soulful. There’s a grave temper at the heart of the movie. Something melancholy to do with the way our dream life has far more power than our lived experience. That’s a familiar riff (and Ozon seems to know it – hence all the quotes). Which isn’t to say In the House is deep; but it’s sharp, it grips and it has ideas. And that’s more than I can say about a lot of recent pictures.

The plot is clever but its premise is archetypal; a story of a master’s apprentice whose talent is destined to eclipse and ultimately overwhelm that of his mentor. The twist here is that there is the tantalising possibility that the mentee has somehow tapped the secret desires of his teacher.

Germain Germain (note the Nabokovian double-name) has the look of a beaten man. He’s played by the great Fabrice Luchini, an actor expert at conjuring laughs and disquiet out of wormy aggression. Germain is a high-school lit teacher who once had literary ambitions. He’s in a seemingly happy marriage with Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), a curator who greets Germain’s lengthy dinner table dissertations on the profound purpose of great books as one would appraise a charming relic from a long dead golden age: 'art means nothing," she declares, with the smile of the truly content.

Meanwhile, Germain lives in a scornful rage; his class of 16-year-old boys are disinterested, mediocre dullards. Except for Claude (Ernst Umhauer). Pretty, quiet and watchful, Claude writes a composition that impresses Germain, who decides in quick time to take him on as a special project (and of course we see that perhaps Claude is exploiting the older man’s ego).

The subject of Claude’s story is his visit to the family of his only high school pal, Rapha (Bastien Ughetto). They live a beautiful box of a house and their life seems epically banal. The father, Rapha Sr. (Denis Menochet), is a robust character who likes basketball. The mother, Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner), is lovely, bored, perhaps troubled by something mysterious. Claude insinuates himself into their lives. He discovers secrets, and pretty soon his very presence is creating drama – but it’s a conflict that the teen finds hard to control"¦

Germain is impressed by Claude’s intuitive sense of style, his sardonic asides, and skill with words. The one composition evolves into a series of short essays, and eventually becomes a lengthy domestic tale where Claude becomes a kind of emotional vampire sucking on the neurotic life-blood of his best friend’s family. Germain is delighted; he encourages his pupil to dig deeper into the 'characters’. Pretty soon Germain is hooked; he can’t tell whether what Claude is writing about Rapha and his folks is entirely fictional or poetic reportage or simply 'the truth’ (and Ozon never makes it entirely clear to us either).

Ozon at first lets Claude slide into the film like he’s one of those creepy kids familiar from a long line of 'bad seed’ horror flicks; he’s all inscrutable smiles, stillness and shadowy looks. To the characters here, he’s a blank slate, though; everyone seems perfectly happy to project their own ambitions onto this seemingly guileless character – one who doesn’t seem to have much more to offer than a pleasant manner and an unassuming energy. But as the multiple narratives evolve and impact on each other, Claude becomes less an emblem of the 'invasive author’ and a genuinely poignant figure who is using fiction as a power tool to drive himself into a world his class has excluded him from.

The only major character who can see the folly in all this is Jeanne. Germain shares Claude’s fiction with her and she is aghast at both the teenager’s ruthlessness and its grip on her husband’s imagination. Ozon pushes this stuff into some sly comedy: 'We haven’t had sex since Claude started writing this."

The set-up is the occasion for Ozon to get adventurous with tone and mood; In the House is full of satire and frivolity. I like the way that Germain intrudes on Claude’s fiction like a pesky phantom so he can 'edit’ the action – and this in the middle of a scene we imagine is 'real’. But the best of his satirical jibes come at the expense of bourgeois French cinema. Germain’s savage demolition job on the way Claude designs and develops his 'characters’ sounds like nothing less than a critique on any one of a number of recent French film plots. That’s company that Ozon can excuse himself from.