In The House

Synopsis: Sixteen-year-old Claude (Ernst Umhauer) insinuates himself into the house of a fellow student from his literature class and writes about it in essays for his French teacher, M. Germain (Fabrice Luchini). As time goes on the line between imagination and reality blurs.

Depending on whether you like cleverness in your films François Ozon's In The House will either be a treat or a turn-off for it is French film in its most analytic form – wordy, sophisticated, satirical and peppered with literary references from La Fontaine to Flaubert to Pasolini (with a scornful aside to Barbara Cartland).

In The House is the third time that the director has tackled the relationship between art and reality (he did so previously in Swimming Pool in 2003 and Angel in 2007) and he does it here with mordant wit.  I assume that a considerable debt is owed to Juan Mayorga's play "The Boy In The Back Row" from which Ozon’s script has been “freely adapted” but nevertheless In The House is a beautifully-crafted film with the director’s intelligence and impeccable signature style written all over it.

Although superbly staged by Ozon and featuring first class performances all-round what makes the film so rewarding is the felicity with which Ozon brings off the self-reflexive duality which is at its heart. The idea of depicting the morphing of imagination and reality, fact and fiction is a tempting but challenging one that often ends up being heavy-handed or fudged. Ozon does it skilfully by playing with both the form and content of his film.  Firstly he keeps us unsure as to what kind of film we are watching – Claude might be a character out of Michael Haneke’s Funny Games, his apparent disingenuousness suggesting darker motives and even darker actions to come. But there is also a dryly humorous tone that suggests that we are watching a comedy, even if one of a blacker stripe, particularly in the relationship between M. Germain and his improbably chic art gallery manager wife (Kristin Scott Thomas).

The narrative is built on a series of short essays that Claude periodically gives to M. Germain, his literature teacher, which gives an account of his developing friendship with a none-too-sharp classmate (Bastien Ughetto) as he insinuates himself into the latter’s family home. As M. Germain and his wife read these they become drawn into the story, which we see played out, she believing that what Claude has written is reportage and disturbed by its implication, he treating it as fiction and encouraging Claude to continue, critiquing the characters and the structure and development of his talented pupil's imaginary outpourings according to the tenets of realist literary theory. Eventually, carried away with the adventure he happily becomes a character in the story but at a heavy cost in his personal life.

Although in the latter stage of the film Ozon could perhaps be accused of glibness with the relationship between M. Germain and his wife being summarily dismissed in favour of a neatly staged ending, for the most part In The House amuses and stimulates in equal parts.

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