Film review: In the House (Dans la Maison)

Part comedy, part thriller, part psycho-drama, French New Wave director Francois Ozon’s film unfolds slowly and assuredly into an intriguing tale of an adolescent imposter – The Talented Master Ripley, perhaps. There are even shades of a young Matt Damon about the protagonist, Claude (Ernst Umhauer), a quiet new boy whose promise stands out amid the intellectual vacuum of jaded high school professor Germain’s literature class.

Like Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley, Claude is effectively an orphan – at least, we think he is: In the House plays with reality more and more as the film progresses, so we cannot be sure. What we do know is that Claude (again, like Ripley) is highly intelligent: using his mathematical skills as an unofficial tutor, he befriends Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), a struggling student whose happy bourgeois home life fascinates the motherless Claude. It’s his writing talents, however, that grab the attention of Germain (Fabrice Luchini): once he insinuates himself chez Rapha, Claude begins a series of voyeuristic essays that lay bare the family, financial and sexual dynamics of his new friend’s household. Gripped and appalled – though not quite in equal measure: professional ethics go out of the window for Germain in his curiosity to see how the story continues – the teacher and his modern art gallery-running wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) lap up Claude’s successive instalments, which end with a tantalizing “à suivre”, or “to be continued”. Meanwhile, the teenager’s obsession with the unsuspecting family enters sinister territory.

Ozon handles the juxtaposed strands of the film deftly, interweaving the psychological intrigue with some smartly observed comedy. Both teaching and the art world are neatly skewered: Germain bemoans that one of his pupils’ “what I did at the weekend” essay consisted of eating pizza on Saturday and nothing on Sunday, while the exhibits in Jeanne’s failing art gallery are ludicrously kitschy and pretentious, dictators’ heads stuck on sex dolls. The viewer doesn’t have to live in Paris to surmise that the caricature may have real-life equivalents.

The drama and danger of inappropriate teacher-pupil relations have received similarly dark treatment in films such as Notes on a Scandal, and the deceptively dangerous teenager is another common trope, so In the House’s subject matter is not original. But it’s wryly presented, and the blurring of truth and fiction – how much of Claude’s narration is true and how much invented to please his tutor? – wrong-foots the viewer, frequently calling into question the events on the screen. This metafictional approach helps make the movie an unusual entry in the “cuckoo in the nest” genre.

Ozon’s efforts are aided by an accomplished and well chosen cast. Luchini is superb as the world-weary academic, a failed writer reinvigorated by the chance of vicarious literary success through a young boy. Though she doesn’t have a huge amount of screen time, Scott Thomas is as wonderful a presence as ever. And Umhauer was a superb find to play the young imposter: his handsome yet ambiguous face makes him plausible as the well meaning school chum and eager pupil but also as the teenage tempter and middle-class marriage wrecker. This allows Ozon to keep his protagonist’s motivation a perfect mystery.