There are writers who appeal to the playful side of us by breaking a few rules in order to keep our curiosity alive. Their stories, if done right, hook us and we find ourselves addicted to the thrill of finding out what happens next. It helps if the author is a creative analyst of human nature and is willing to lead us into new explorations of passion and other vibrant emotions.
The gifted French director Francois Ozon has delivered a very clever, funny, and innovative drama based on The Boy in the Last Row by Juan Mayorga, a Spanish playwright. Germain (Fabrice Luchini) teaches literature and creative writing at Lycee Gustave Flaubert. His own career as a fiction writer has fizzled. Now he's going through the motions of trying to draw out the creativity of his suburban students who are incapable of putting together an interesting essay on "What I Did Last Weekend."
Claude (Ernst Umhauer), a student who sits quietly in the back of the room, surprises Germain by handing in a two-page essay that is an imaginative and well-done piece of work about tricking his way into the suburban home of a classmate named Rapha (Bastien Ughetto) and charting this family's normality. He ends the essay with the lure of more to come by promising "To be continued." Germain reads the story to his stylish wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) who manages an art gallery. Thrilled with the prospect of helping Claude make the most of his talent, Germain volunteers to serve as his writing coach outside the classroom.
Claude, who scores points with the family by successfully tutoring Rapha in math, continues the story by depicting the close relationship between Rapha and his father who have bonded together in a mutual love of sports.. The writer's libido is aroused by Rapha's beautiful but bored mother Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner). As the story of seduction unspools, Germain becomes so addicted to Claude's story that he is willing to act unethically. He shows more interest in his star pupil than in his wife.
Ozon is a director who brings out the best in his actors and actresses. Charlotte Rampling gave the most compelling performance of her long career as a middle-aged woman unhinged by loss in Under the Sand. In Swimming Pool, Ludvine Sagnier was totally convincing as a teenage hedonist whose erotic power has a transformative effect on others. In this film, Fabrice Luchini, one of France's most versatile actors, displays his skills by conveying Germain's vanity, his patronizing attitude toward his wife, his voyeurism, his physical attraction to Claude, his delight in creativity, and his disdain for avant-garde paintings and sculpture.
We don't want to spoil the delicious developments in the last part of In the House but we can tell you that they left us wanting to see a sequel — to feel our pulses pound once again as Claude reveals new episodes that sign off with "to be continued." Until Ozon and company decide to grant this wish, we all can embrace our creativity and let our imaginations run wild by spending some time imagining what normal people playing their own parts in the human comedy are doing in the houses or apartments across the street from where we live. Feel free to write it down.
Special features on the DVD include am aking-of featurette; premiere footage at Le Grand Rex; bloopers; costume fittings; poster fittings; poster gallery; and deleted scenes.
Screened at the Rendev-Vous with French Cinema 2013, Film Society of Lincoln Center.
