In the House
Directed by François Ozon
Written by François Ozon
with Fabrice Luchini, Kristen Scott Thomas, Ernst Umhauer
2012
Germain (Fabrice Luchini) teaches Literature to sixteen-year-olds. With a fresh class to work with, he sets each of them to producing an essay about their weekends: a simple task so he can assess their writing ability. A failed novelist himself, his discerning but frustrated eye passes disdainfully over one lazy note after another, before he comes across a piece different to the others. It shows a vaguely unsettling fascination with the home and family of a fellow pupil, but expresses it intriguingly, and what’s more promises further installments. His attention caught, Germain reads the essay out to his wife, Jeanne (Kristen Scott Thomas) who is as bemused by it as he is. The next day he finds the author, a quiet, intelligent boy named Claude (Ernst Umhauer), and, telling him he has talent but needs to learn, begins to guide him through the next installments of his story. But as he begins to impress his own ideas on Claude (and those of Jeanne, to whom he faithfully recounts each new chapter), is he beginning to take part in Claude’s interference with an unassuming family? Or is he just revealing more of himself to Claude than he means to?
For the most part, this is a film about the writing process, full of intensely literate discussions on symbolism and different writing styles, and rather neatly raising questions on the nature of authorship and how meaning is derived from art. Yet there is more humanity – albeit of a slightly disparaging sort– and character to it than pure intellectualism. Germain, a kind of benevolent Salieri, begins to cut quite a pathetic figure as his responsibilities as a teacher start to clash with his cherished creative impulses. Luchini is very good both on his own terms and as part of two double acts within the film; he and Scott Thomas are funny and believable as a cultured couple becoming addicted to Claude’s world and inadvertently finding themselves looking in a mirror, and it is amusing to watch him with Umhauer, and to try and figure out which one of them is out of his depth.
Both the script and the direction are very deft; interweaving imaginary scenes with ‘reality’ can often be unwieldy and damage the flow of a story, but here the subject matter more or less demands it and it is done very well. Ozon, a talented director and a good judge of when to be visually playful and when to rest on the dialogue, doesn’t go in for pulling the rug from under the audience or keeping them guessing as to what’s really happening. That question remains at the back of the mind throughout the film, but the format is really used, under the guise of appraising Claude’s writing, to go over the preoccupations of the characters and what meaning they take from events. I had the same problem I have with many French films with middle-class characters, in that I’m never sure whether the endless conversations about literature, art and philosophy are intended seriously or are mocking pretensions, but in this case either way works just as well. I can’t pick out any coherent overall message, but as drama In the House is entertaining and thoughtful even if, like me, you’re left with the feeling you should have reached a deeper understanding than you did.
Tom
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