Another film review for now - the plan is still for this blog to be largely literary, such being the nature of La Loutre, but this excellent new film deserves a write-up.
For Germain (Fabrice Luchini), French teacher in a lycée, it’s just the start of another
school year. His students are as dim and disaffected as ever, responding to the
homework task ‘write about your weekend’ with insights such as “J’ai mangé une
pizza”. Only Claude (Ernst Umhauer) is different. His account of his longed-for
entry into a classmate’s house, on the pretext of tutoring him in maths, is
elegant, cynical…gripping. The account concludes with “A suivre..”, “to be continued”, and Germain is already hooked. He
keeps Claude behind after class, ostensibly to reprimand him for the tone of
his story, but really because he is intrigued. Claude gives him the next
instalment.
François Ozon has used relatively well-worn plot devices – an
inappropriate teacher-pupil relationship, the framing of one narrative with
another – to create something both delightfully fresh and genuinely gripping.
Claude’s after-school sessions with his teacher alternate with the scenes of
his story, which takes place in the house of his classmate Rapha. As Claude’s
story develops, Germain offers suggestions for improvements and Claude revises,
so that we see several versions of the same story unfolding in succession. It
becomes increasingly unclear, to the viewer and to Germain, which of the events have 'really' taken place. This blurring of reality
and fiction reaches its logical conclusion when Germain, after reading one of
Claude’s more unpleasant attempts at an ending, reacts in a panic, having
concluded that the story may be true.
The real triumph of this film is the fine balance of its
tone, which, while retaining the edge of a psychological thriller, remains
comic at its heart. Claude’s satirical portraits of the dim and sporty Rapha père and Rapha fils, and Esther, “la
femme de la classe moyenne”, mediocre and depressed, make us laugh while also
being disturbingly cynical in the mouth, or rather from the pen, of a
16-year-old schoolboy. Similarly, Claude’s self-proclaimed ignorance of all the
literary forms that Germain tells him he is using is entertaining to begin
with, but becomes increasingly sinister as the extent of Claude’s calculating
behaviour is revealed. Ernst Umhauer brings exactly the right understated
creepiness to the role of the lycéen.
In the sub-plot that is, significantly, Germain’s life, his
wife (the perennially magnificent Kristin Scott Thomas), who runs a struggling
art gallery, is by turns intrigued by Claude’s story and exasperated by her
husband’s obsession with it. She says at the start of the film: “You know very
well that art doesn’t teach us anything”, a statement so loaded with critical
and historical baggage that it can hardly go unnoticed. Indeed, Dans la maison poses all kinds of
questions about the function of art, whether by sending up modern visual art or
by juxtaposing Germain’s enthusiasm for the written word with his ineptitude in
the face of ‘real life’.
Though we may suspect from the start that Germain’s
infatuation with his angel-faced protégé will not end well, we, like the
teacher, are eager to see where Claude, and Ozon, will lead us. If Claude’s story
and Germain’s desire to hear it are voyeuristic, then by extension we are
voyeurs too. An intelligent study in desire, artifice and manipulation, while also remaining a joy from start to finish, Dans
la maison is a subtle and spectacular success.
