Review of In the House (2012) by Dave J — 10 Apr 2013

A brilliant, playful, provocative story about stories: why we need narratives, how they can be used and misused, and how dangerous they can be. In The House is also a funny, sexy film about coming of age and breaking rules.

Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is an unhappy high school literature teacher, frustrated by his dull-witted students. He asks a class to write an essay about what they did last weekend, and is mostly appalled by their efforts. But one essay, from a quiet 16-year-old boy named Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer) stands out a mile, because of the quality of the writing and the tale's sinister overtones.

The essay explains Claude's obsession with the seemingly perfect family life of his classmate Rapha (Bastien Ughetto). Claude has no such domestic idyll to go home to; he's the son of an unemployed, disabled father and an absent mother. His assignment paper tells how he befriended Rapha and then infiltrated his family by offering to help his classmate with his worst subject, maths. It also describes Claude's stirrings of desire for Rapha's attractive mother Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner). Germain is both fascinated and appalled, and can't resist setting up one-to-one tuition sessions with Claude which centre on further instalments of his story about Rapha's family. But where is the division between truth and fiction? As the film continues, that distinction blurs both for the characters and for the audience.

There's a strong tonal resemblance to the best latter-day Woody Allen films here, an influence apparently acknowledged by a scene in which we see some of the protagonists queuing to see Allen's film 'Match Point'. Germain is a very Allen-esque character, even down to his physical appearance. There are plenty of literary references, and some ribald fun at the expense of modern art. The scenes set in the struggling art gallery run by Germain's wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) reward close attention: some of the works on display are hilarious. The whole movie is a highly entertaining comic cautionary tale about the power of stories and the perils of compulsive fascination.