Reviewed: In the House directed by François Ozon

Here’s looking at you, kid.

In the House (15)
dir: François Ozon

With In the House, his 13th feature in 14 years, the variable but never dull director François Ozon has made his most purely satisfying film. It’s a sophisticated comic thriller about the pleasures and perils of storytelling. To a plot with shades of Rear Window, Ozon has added class tensions and some clever asides on the sacrifices and responsibilities of art. To watch it is to be simultaneously seduced and interrogated.

Germain is a middle-aged literature teacher at a suburban secondary school. When I tell you that he is bored and jaded, and fumes about philistine pupils who respond to a “How I Spent my Weekend” assignment with paragraphs about junk food and video games, you must bear in mind that he is played by Fabrice Luchini, France’s wittiest actor and a man capable of expressing infinite varieties of weary scorn. But In the House gives him cause to display also a boyish glee. When Germain discovers a potential literary genius among his new intake in the form of Claude (Ernst Umhauer), a pretty, sly-eyed 16-year-old, he is nearly breathless with joy. The boy has written an essay about his efforts to ingratiate himself with a classmate, Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), whose bourgeois lifestyle he envies, whose home he has infiltrated and whose mother (Emmanuelle Seigner) he desires. As Germain reads this aloud to his wife, Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), Jérôme Alméras’s camera creeps closer to the couple. Philippe Rombi’s sad-sinister score grows restless, even titillated. Germain and Jeanne are on tenterhooks. Claude’s bulletin from inside the house ends “To be continued . . .” but they want more. We know the feeling.

Germain is in a quandary. He must encourage the boy’s talent without endorsing his duplicity. And yet he wants to know how the story proceeds. Like any reader or viewer, he is a sucker for a juicy yarn. He organises a regular private class with Claude, ostensibly to nurture his writing but also to push forward this particular narrative. The most selfreflexive scenes here show teacher and pupil analysing what we’ve been watching, as though tutoring us in our appreciation of the film, but the tone is tangy rather than academic. “Are you writing what you see or transforming it?” Germain asks, forcing Claude to recognise his role as a manipulator. If a draft doesn’t ring true, he urges a rewrite. (We get to see both versions, like alternative takes of a movie.) When the romantic imbroglios in Claude’s writing become tangled, Germain splutters: “This is a bad farce!” On the matter of endings, his advice is that the reader should be left saying: “I didn’t expect that. But it couldn’t end any other way.” For a lesser director, that line might have been a hostage to fortune. For Ozon, it becomes another rule to bend.

He has explored previously the collapsible boundaries between art and life, most obviously in Swimming Pool, his psychological thriller about a crime novelist on holiday. But not since his 1999 masterpiece Under the Sand has he made such an elegantly controlled work. The structure alone of In the House is a thing of multilayered beauty: as Germain becomes addicted to Claude’s essays, it dawns on us that we’re getting our kicks watching him getting his kicks reading about Claude getting his kicks. That’s three layers of voyeurism, three sets of peeping Toms. The doorways in the family home are high and wide like proscenium arches, giving those scenes the air of a stage production mounted by Claude for an audience of one. (Ozon’s screenplay is adapted loosely from a play, Juan Mayorga’s The Boy in the Back Row.) Narrative conventions are relaxed until the screenplay starts to mirror the open-plan school, with its transparent spaces and lack of parameters. Germain begins strolling unseen through the scenarios Claude describes, like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton dropping in on their younger selves in Annie Hall. Soon the boy is weaving the teacher and his wife into the story, giving them access to private observations made about them by strangers. It’s only a matter of time before somebody breaks the fourth wall.

Despite this constant buzz of postmodern playfulness, In the House never sacrifices its thriller credentials. Its suspense stays rooted in the psychologically credible, such as the classroom scene in which Germain draws the oblivious Rapha recklessly into this drama of Claude’s making. But the picture also has Ozon’s characteristic lightness of touch, not least in the fizzy banter between Luchini and Scott Thomas; they’re so good together that I found myself hoping they might get their own spin-off film or sitcom, even as Claude’s writing shines a merciless light on their imperfect marriage.

Here and elsewhere, the movie’s point is crisply made. Art can be hazardous: handle with care.