For his puckish new fable, In the House (opening May 17 at Seven Gables Theater), François Ozon trades the swimming pool and beach for a sly, disquieting foray inside a middle-class maison. For lycée student Claude (Ernst Umhauer), the home of his banal, “normal” friend Rapha (Bastien Ughetto) is a mysterious object of desire. Offering to tutor Rapha in math, he gains admittance, and begins an exploration of its contents — and discontents.
But let’s return to the set-up, because that’s where Ozon introduces you to the gloriously nondescript, graying Germain (Fabrice Luchini), about to begin another year at the portentously titled Lycée Gustave Flaubert. Germain, you sense quickly, prides himself on having been around the pedagogical block, he’s seen reforms come and go, and the latest — the school is adopting a uniform code so that all the students can feel egalitarian — is just l’eau off his cynical canard‘s back.
Of course it is a pretense, because Germain still believes in certain things. Not uniforms, but literature, the power of story, the way the storyteller can superpose him or herself to the story. To tell a story about middle-class existence is somehow to be better than that. When Claude, as part of a writing exercise, alone out of the whole class, manages to summon up more than two sentences about his weekend (Saturday one student ate pizza, Sunday they were tired and did nothing), Germain reads Claude’s efforts to his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), who has troubles of her own: her avant-garde art gallery needs to start selling its works. The current exhibit of dictators’ heads on sex dolls, a commentary on the dictatorship of sex, has not brought in eager customers.
Impressed, both begin following Claude’s serialized adventures as he meets Rapha senior (Denis Ménochet) and his wife Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner). They have bourgeois concerns: Rapha would like to get a business started in China, and Esther is interested in interior decor. The serial form, “to be continued,” keeps Jeanne and Germain (and the viewer) turning pages, but there’s nothing of much import to middle-class existence. People have trouble at work, they have bad backs, they like to watch basketball on TV and eat pizza.
Esther has, Claude discovers, reproductions of Klee watercolors and has never learned what their German titles mean. How can he not fall for her? Taking Claude under his wing, Germain, for what may be the first time in his life, begins actually trying to teach a student, rather than induce in them a familiarity with the French literary canon. He has Claude read his favorite books, try on the voices of Flaubert and Dostoevsky.
As Germain intrudes into Claude’s writing, Ozon shows him popping up into the scenes as they’re being recounted, provoking some metafictional commentary. But the project here is more about the construction of a middle-class identity — that wall that Claude keeps trying to peer over, just as Germain tried to, you surmise, when he was younger — and its relation to the state, which strives to cultivate that mi-citoyen identity. That’s a story, too. To be authentic is to be, on the evidence here, slightly rueful.
