(France,
105 min.)
Written and directed by François Ozon
Starring: Fabrice Luchini, Ernst Umhauer, Kristin Scott
Thomas, Emmanuelle Seigner, Bastien Ughetto, Denis Ménochet.
 |
| Fabrice Luchini and Kristin Scott Thomas star in In the House. Photo courtesy Les Films Séville. |
Spying on the neighbours might be the most fun a person can
have without spending a dime. Take, for example, the harmless thrill of seeing
a slightly deranged neighbour unpack a new load of flowers from his truck and
then watch him get back in and accidently back up over the tubs of carnations.
It’s wrong to watch and giggle as he kicks at the tires and swears at the dog,
but it’s funny for all the wrong reasons. The same goes for deducing with a
fellow barista that two coffee shop regulars are having an affair. It’s not
hard to put two and two together when there’s a motel that charges by the
quarter-hour within the sight line of the espresso machine. Prying eyes and
gossip are what passes for fun in dull suburbia.
The undeniable guilty pleasure in people-watching receives masterful treatment in François Ozon’s latest release In the House (Dans la maison). In the House presents a whole school of voyeurs (like fish, they swim in packs) doing the creepy people-watching. The story begins when Germain, played by Fabrice Luchini in a fascinating performance, reads to his wife, Jeanne, played by the equally fascinating Kristin Scott Thomas, a brief writing assignment submitted by one of his pupils.
The story stands out amongst the bland, poorly written
creative writing exercises turned in by the hack writers in Germain’s class.
It’s a two-pager, well-written and engaging, versus other assignments that run
nary a couplet. It has a real story to tell, as it playfully engrosses the
teacher in its tale of afterschool perversion. As told in a first person
account by a student named Claude (Ernst Umhauer, making a strong impression in
this breakthrough role), the paper details the pleasure in spying on the family
of his friend and classmate Rapha Artole (Bastien Ughetto). As Ozon swallows M.
and Mme. Germain in a slow perverse zoom, In
the House reels the audience into a deviant complicity with the two
readers: it’s the kind of story that should be thrown in the trash, but we want
to hear more. Claude knows the hook of his intriguing, if repulsive, tale, as
he anticipates his teacher’s nosiness and concludes with the playful parenthesis
of “(To be continued…).”
Jeanne, clear-headed and proper, suggests that Claude advise
the student to stick to subject matter that is more appropriate in future
assignments. The story is the kind of icky warning sign of which the school
headmaster should be notified, but Germain, against all good logic and advice,
admires the potential of this wordsmith and precious snowflake.
When class meets again to study literature with Germain at
the aptly named Lycée Gustave Flaubert, Germain follows Jeanne’s reasoning and
confronts Claude. Claude, disappointed that his teacher disapproves of his
flair for storytelling, asks to submit the next assignment early. It’s an
adjective exercise, which Germain and Jeanne read with disapproving relish.
This new story fills in the yummy details that have been missing before. Claude
also ups the ante in this tale and describes to the reader(s) his amusement
with Rapha’s father, Rapha Sr. (played by Denis Ménochet, whom many viewers
will recognize as M. LaPadite, the ill-fated dairy farmer in Quentin
Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds). A
satirist, Claude dubs his classmate and the father “the Rapha Males”. Most
juicy, though, is Claude’s obsession with Rapha’s sexy bored mother, Esther (Emmanuelle
Seigner), and writes in adjective-laden detail his desire to caress her sweet
middle-class inner thigh. Germain and Jeanne couldn’t find better bedtime
reading at the drug store.
The premise of In the
House instantly puts one at unease. This is a dirty tale about things that
are meant to be kept private. What goes on in anyone’s house is the business of
that family and that family alone. One can’t help, though, in wanting to infer using
all the words and actions observed out of context. Neighbours, commoners, and
average working class Joes are much more interesting if they have a double
life.
Ozon consistently plays with the sordidness of In the House’s premise and teases the
audience with the salaciousness of the story using some expertly handled tone. Adapting
a play by Juan Mayorga, Ozon finds an unusual tale with which to blend the unnerving
eroticism he’s created in films like Swimming
Pool and Under the Sand with the quirky
humour of films like 8 Women and Potiche. It’s surprisingly funny to
watch as the bourgeois couple played by Luchini and Scott Thomas get their
jollies off by reading Claude’s stories. The two leads have a Woody Allen-ish
rapport as they lie back and extrapolate the details in Claude’s serial with
hilariously intellectual banter. Ozon knows how uncomfortable this material can
be and he uses humour both to create a farce out of this comedy of manners and
to further the satire of the bored bourgeoisie. The energy of the
stage-to-screen adaptation works to the film’s advantage, too, as the
occasional lapse into claustrophobia makes palpable the couple’s desire to
escape their mundane lives. The biting comedic timing of Ozon’s direction and
the actors’ beat is perfectly matched by an ironically sprightly score by
Philippe Rombi that finds folly in the most banal of situations.
Germain and Jeanne aren’t too far off from the Artoles about
whom they read and ponder. The thrill of Claude’s stories reveals to the
audience just how stale the marriage between the Germains is. The husband and
wife seem to be going nowhere in their careers—he’s a failed writer who settled
to be a teacher and she’s struggling to run an art gallery by selling trendy
contemporary pseudo-art. The stories, then, provide Germain and Jeanne with a
titillating window into their neighbours’ lives. They can escape their stalled
marriage and project their troubles onto an equally boring family. It’s far
more entertaining to create problems for others than it is to solve your own.
In the House
accentuates this novelty quite thrillingly in the teacher-student relationship
between Germain and Claude. Germain begins to tutor his pupil in private after
the first few letters reveal Claude’s potential; however, there comes a point
in In the House in which Claude
inverts the power dynamics of the relationship and enjoys a playful
manipulation of his elder. Germain is a bored wannabe novelist, after all, so
it’s to his advantage to be schooled in the art of suspenseful storytelling.
Germain’s love for fiction becomes the central moral dilemma
that makes In the House such an engrossing
domestic comedy-thriller. He knows fully the unethical nature of coaxing a
student to refine his skills by fictionalizing a family drama that centre’s
upon said student’s bizarre infatuation with a schoolmate’s life. The
escalating unseemliness of Claude’s stories takes Germain further past the
point of no return, but each reveal prompts more appetite. Germain becomes so
absorbed in the project that he fashions himself in the role of storyteller as
Ozon blurs the line between the character’s grasp of fiction and reality, and
invites him into the Artoles’ home as he watches his student fondle Esther’s
bland floral print gowns. In the House strikes
a perfect chord by matching the sense of impropriety with the Flaubert-ian
hunger for an alternative. (As Little
Children’s Sarah Peirce might say.) Blurring truth and literature, Germain
uses Claude as a surrogate (or vice versa) to write a life that seems worth living.
Voyeurism hasn’t been this delicious since Jimmy Stewart
trolled the apartments across the courtyard in Rear Window. The spot-on final shot of In the House gives an appropriate nod to the Hitchcockian admission
that we like to watch. The dark underside of clean middle-class living has never
been so entertaining thanks to the pitch-perfect work by the ensemble and the
director nor has it been so open to admit that most of the dirty business we
imagine simply exists in one’s own mind. The neighbours are actually as clean
and as boring as they seem. Some of them are, anyways.
(To be continued…)
Rating: ★★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
Rating: ★★★★½ (out of ★★★★★)
In the House is currently playing in Ottawa at The ByTowne.
