This movie works for several reasons, most of all because of the script. Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is a French lit teacher married to Jeanne (Kristen Scott Thomas), who runs a modern art gallery without much success; she insists on showing conceptual art that no one understands, or in fact that everyone understands too well as pretentious claptrap. Germain, disgusted by his students' plebeian efforts at writing, at first comes across as a kind of aesthetic purist who sees literature as occupying some sort of moral high ground; we are gently pushed to this conclusion because we can see he is uncomfortable about telling his wife the truth about her gallery, that merely slapping a picture of Hitler on a blow-up doll is not a real indictment of the tyranny of gender (or the gendering of tyranny – it works either way, and you just know that somewhere some art student has come up with the same idea and someone like Camille Paglia has praised it). Amidst the dross, he is surprised to find a short essay by one of his students (Claude) that captivates him. In crisp simple prose, Claude describes his fascination with the house and family of schoolmate Rapha and how, as a math tutor to help his nice but thick petty-bourgeois friend (tellingly, he cannot understand "imaginary numbers"), he manages to infiltrate Rapha's house and capture the "scent of a middle class woman", Rapha's mother convincingly played by Emmanuelle Seigner. He ends his vivid account with a "to be continued" (à suivre, in French, whose terseness is a bit more urgent than the English version). Germain starts talking to Claude, who until then was an otherwise unremarkable student. He begins tutoring him and encouraging him to write, although he maintains a superior attitude about the relationship (more or less: "it would appear you have some small talent"). Here is where it gets interesting. Germain becomes so entranced by Claude's treatment of his friend's ultra-conventional and boring middle class family that he begins to suggest which details to emphasise in his accounts. In other words, he starts suggesting plot lines to heighten the narrative drama, which Claude more or less puts into play by manipulating the family; eventually, the division between fantasy and reality is broached. It seems at first the film will insist on being yet another highbrow indictment of middle class banality – young Claude is smarter and better educated than anyone in the Rapha household; even Mommy Rapha's obsession with House Beautiful style decoration is belied by her very banal results. But there's a twist: amidst the semi-snide comments it becomes increasingly obvious that Claude and Germain have other agendas than merely exploring the upper reaches of high art by diving into the world of the petty bourgeois Raphas. Manipulating the Raphas becomes a power game, in which Germain can flatter his ego that was flattened by his lack of literary talent (we discover he is a failed novelist), and Claude can finally feel something because he comes from a broken home with a paralysed (!) father and a mother who abandoned the family when Claude was young (we get hints later that it was to seek love). At this point, nearly everyone is tainted and morally ambiguous: Germain's wife's gallery fails because she insists on showing highbrow conceptual art that no one buys despite warnings from the building owners (a deus ex machina represented by "twins"), but she leaves him when she realises Germain is no more than an emotional voyeur who can only live through Claude's manipulation of the innocent Raphas. Germain gets fired because he stole a math test so Claude could get brownie points with the thick Rapha junior; Claude's alleged talent is revealed to be no more than a fascination with the seedy; at the end, he seems as homeless as the by-now fired Germain. When the Raphas get their act together to take advantage of a deal in China, they unite: Mommy rejects Claude's advances and realises he's just a boy with a boy's childish destructive streak; Daddy grows a pair, stops whining about his richer and more successful partner, and launches his own business; even Rapha junior, thick headed and apparently innocent and naïve, finally realises that Claude is really more of an emotional parasite than a friend and beats him up for making a pass at his mother. In the end, the boring and conventional Raphas are vindicated, and the intellectual and artistic highbrows (Claude, Germain and his wife) are ruined. This is a script-driven film; everything is narrated, and the actors are illustrating scenes that Claude has written at the urging of his mentor and fellow emotional cripple Germain. As such, it could have been slow but the pace is quite racy; director François Ozon not only uses the "to be followed" to keep up interest, he gives a little wink to the audience when he overuses it with several hypothetical scenes are played out to get a resolution. All in all, a highly successful film adaptation of a novel, with fine actors, pacing and dialogue.
Review of In the House
