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In the House More at IMDbPro »Dans la maison (original title)
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| Index | 20 reviews in total |
42 out of 45 people found the following review useful:
Best Ozon in years!, 12 October 2012
Author:
doomgen_29 from France
Often funny, sometimes disturbing and sensual, the movie can be enjoyed at face value, but the heart of the movie lies underneath that appealing veneer, it's about creation and the required necessity to live your life fully to feed it. The budding writer enters the lives of a family, the same way a writer should embrace life itself, with a healthy dose of curiosity and nerve, precisely what his teacher is lacking. Add to that a fascinating and intricate observation of the blurring of lines separating reality from fiction in the feverish midst of artistic creation. Deep stuff, but all wrapped up in a neat bundle, Ozon making sure to leave almost no one on the side of the road, so to speak. So in conclusion it's smart and yet playful, intellectual but never pretentious. Well, in other words, it's a very good movie about potentially boring subjects. Highly recommended in those times of idiocracy!
13 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Fact or fiction?, 20 February 2013
Author:
Martin Bradley (MOscarbradley@aol.com) from Derry, Ireland
Francois Ozon's delightful, delicious new comedy "In the House" is a
wonderfully clever and very funny treatise on the written word
delivered in very cinematic terms, on the thin line between fact and
fiction, truth and lies and the individual's need for attention.
The central characters are two misplaced males destined, perhaps, to be
together and who find each other almost by accident. Germain is a
middle-aged (and bitterly cynical) schoolteacher, (a terrific Fabrice
Luchini), who one day finds that an essay handed in by handsome young
loner student Claude, (Ernst Umhauer, excellent), has all the promise
of a blossoming literary talent simply because it deals, in a
well-written way, of course, in 'truths', (it describes Claude's
infatuation with a fellow student and his family and what might go on
'dans la maison' in which they live), and the essay ends 'to be
continued'.
He shows the essay to his wife, (a lovely performance from Kristin
Scott Thomas), and, on the one hand, egged on by her and, on the other,
despite her misgivings he takes Claude under his wing, so to speak,
encouraging him to produce more 'to be continued' episodes on what goes
on behind the walls of his friend's family home. As someone says, it
can only end badly.
The brilliance of Ozon's conceit is that what we see and what we hear
aren't always the same. Sometimes if Germain thinks 'a factual'
description of events is not worthy of his talents, Claude will change
it in the next scene and as Claude's 'literary career' progresses some
of the things he writes has no basis in fact whatsoever so that we,
too, are left wondering what's real and what isn't.
It is, of course, a hugely sophisticated comedy where a subplot
involving Germain's wife's preoccupation with the art gallery she runs
is used to counter-balance Germain's increasing preoccupation with
Claude, a preoccupation his wife thinks may even have a sexual basis.
Without giving anything away, the film itself ends with the words 'to
be continued'; if only ...
8 out of 9 people found the following review useful:
An engrossing thriller, 6 January 2013
Author:
Gordon-11 from Hong Kong
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
This film is about a student who writes about his classmate's mother in
his essays. As the teacher encourages him to delve deeper into details,
the unexpected unfolds.
I am blown away by "In the House". The plot sounds simple but it keeps
me engrossed throughout. The young guy Claude looks so innocent and
angelic, but he is surely up to no good. He is so manipulative and
destructive. Coupled with his spine chilling smirks and piercing gaze,
Claude is a scary character than you can ever imagine.
As Germain says, a good story ends in an unexpected way, but the
viewers know that it cannot end any other way. The ending of "In the
House" is exactly like that. Just when I thought the film was about to
end, there is this other scene on a park bench that twists to the real
ending. This ending is even more spine chilling than the one I thought
was the ending.
"In the House" is an excellent thriller. It is easy to follow, but is
entrancing and engrossing. There are scenes that are real, scenes that
are clearly unreal and scenes that you do not know if they are real. It
keeps viewers thinking, making "In the House" even more enjoyable.
10 out of 13 people found the following review useful:
Fabrics of fiction and reality overlap in this voyeuristic experiment. Captivating!, 14 April 2013
Author:
Lee Aequus from Singapore
For his thirteenth feature film, French New Wave director Francois Ozon
has outdone all acclaim given to his 2002 remake of "8 Women" with a
mischievous and dysfunctional tale, of what can be perceived as…
coming-of-age.
A black comedy conflated with so much grandeur from literary greats to
post-modern poioumena, you cannot help but wave the white flag and just
go along in service of jest and sheer curiosity.
Adapted from a brilliant play written by Juan Mayorgo, this film is a
meta-narrative centered on Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer) -- a sixteen
year old loner who intrudes upon the home life of fellow student Rapha
Jr., and writes about it. What begins as a one-off weekend assignment
for literature class, escalates with great passion and frequency when
Claude's teacher, Germaine (Fabrice Luchini) detects flashes of talent
and decides to groom the teenager.
Here, Ozon proposes a three-fold narrative weaving through the surface
of three realities -- Germaine's growing obsession with Claude's story
imitates the viewers' relationship with Ozon's film (and perhaps soap
opera addiction), and Claude as a self-conscious narrator of the events
occurring inside Rapha's house.
When the film begins, Claude is unhappy with a lonely life and clearly
needs to distract himself with wholesome family warmth. Having
witnessed Rapha's close relationship with parents Rapha Sr. and Esther
at the school gate, strikes a friendship with the boy when semester
begins. Establishing himself as a math tutor and study mate, Claude
quickly wins their affection and trust. Thrilled by this opportunity to
experience life with a sense of belonging, yet predisposed to primitive
urge, Claude's desire swells into furtive yearning for Esther. And
naturally, things get complicated.
As Germaine's involvement with Claude's writing departs from passive
reader, to that of a story-telling coach superimposing rules of
dramatic structure, it occurs to the viewer that he may very well be a
shaping hand in the outcome of this voyeuristic experiment.
Of course, the fabrics of fiction and reality overlap but they do not
confuse -- the satirical logic unfolds in ways that are thought-
provoking, humorous and downright captivating.
cinemainterruptus.wordpress.com
12 out of 17 people found the following review useful:
Brilliant, 13 October 2012
Author:
GUENOT PHILIPPE (philippe.guenot@dbmail.com) from France
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
I don't know François Ozon's films very well. I only know that he makes
rather strange, weird and unusual movies. This one is not an exception.
This story of a high school french teacher who has to deal with one of
his students is awesome, very intriguing. The teen in question appears
to be very smart, very intelligent. And far more than that.
This film is actually a sort of thriller which looks like Hitchcock's
features. You may think of REAR WINDOW, for instance. The characters
are well described. And when you know that François Ozon - the director
- is homosexual, you understand the exquisite taste he probably had to
make such a picture, with such a sensibility.
Unfortunately, I did not get everything in this little masterpiece. I
should watch it twice. And it is not the kind of films I am used to
see.
Yes, a very brilliant and intelligent movie. A must see.
13 out of 19 people found the following review useful:
Script-driven film, 19 October 2012
Author:
Guy Lanoue from Canada
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
This movie works for several reasons, most of all because of the script. Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is a French lit teacher married to Jeanne (Kristen Scott Thomas), who runs a modern art gallery without much success; she insists on showing conceptual art that no one understands, or in fact that everyone understands too well as pretentious claptrap. Germain, disgusted by his students' plebeian efforts at writing, at first comes across as a kind of aesthetic purist who sees literature as occupying some sort of moral high ground; we are gently pushed to this conclusion because we can see he is uncomfortable about telling his wife the truth about her gallery, that merely slapping a picture of Hitler on a blow-up doll is not a real indictment of the tyranny of gender (or the gendering of tyranny – it works either way, and you just know that somewhere some art student has come up with the same idea and someone like Camille Paglia has praised it). Amidst the dross, he is surprised to find a short essay by one of his students (Claude) that captivates him. In crisp simple prose, Claude describes his fascination with the house and family of schoolmate Rapha and how, as a math tutor to help his nice but thick petty-bourgeois friend (tellingly, he cannot understand "imaginary numbers"), he manages to infiltrate Rapha's house and capture the "scent of a middle class woman", Rapha's mother convincingly played by Emmanuelle Seigner. He ends his vivid account with a "to be continued" (à suivre, in French, whose terseness is a bit more urgent than the English version). Germain starts talking to Claude, who until then was an otherwise unremarkable student. He begins tutoring him and encouraging him to write, although he maintains a superior attitude about the relationship (more or less: "it would appear you have some small talent"). Here is where it gets interesting. Germain becomes so entranced by Claude's treatment of his friend's ultra-conventional and boring middle class family that he begins to suggest which details to emphasise in his accounts. In other words, he starts suggesting plot lines to heighten the narrative drama, which Claude more or less puts into play by manipulating the family; eventually, the division between fantasy and reality is broached. It seems at first the film will insist on being yet another highbrow indictment of middle class banality – young Claude is smarter and better educated than anyone in the Rapha household; even Mommy Rapha's obsession with House Beautiful style decoration is belied by her very banal results. But there's a twist: amidst the semi-snide comments it becomes increasingly obvious that Claude and Germain have other agendas than merely exploring the upper reaches of high art by diving into the world of the petty bourgeois Raphas. Manipulating the Raphas becomes a power game, in which Germain can flatter his ego that was flattened by his lack of literary talent (we discover he is a failed novelist), and Claude can finally feel something because he comes from a broken home with a paralysed (!) father and a mother who abandoned the family when Claude was young (we get hints later that it was to seek love). At this point, nearly everyone is tainted and morally ambiguous: Germain's wife's gallery fails because she insists on showing highbrow conceptual art that no one buys despite warnings from the building owners (a deus ex machina represented by "twins"), but she leaves him when she realises Germain is no more than an emotional voyeur who can only live through Claude's manipulation of the innocent Raphas. Germain gets fired because he stole a math test so Claude could get brownie points with the thick Rapha junior; Claude's alleged talent is revealed to be no more than a fascination with the seedy; at the end, he seems as homeless as the by-now fired Germain. When the Raphas get their act together to take advantage of a deal in China, they unite: Mommy rejects Claude's advances and realises he's just a boy with a boy's childish destructive streak; Daddy grows a pair, stops whining about his richer and more successful partner, and launches his own business; even Rapha junior, thick headed and apparently innocent and naïve, finally realises that Claude is really more of an emotional parasite than a friend and beats him up for making a pass at his mother. In the end, the boring and conventional Raphas are vindicated, and the intellectual and artistic highbrows (Claude, Germain and his wife) are ruined. This is a script-driven film; everything is narrated, and the actors are illustrating scenes that Claude has written at the urging of his mentor and fellow emotional cripple Germain. As such, it could have been slow but the pace is quite racy; director François Ozon not only uses the "to be followed" to keep up interest, he gives a little wink to the audience when he overuses it with several hypothetical scenes are played out to get a resolution. All in all, a highly successful film adaptation of a novel, with fine actors, pacing and dialogue.
9 out of 12 people found the following review useful:
Where is this skin on this onion?, 31 March 2013
Author:
PipAndSqueak from United Kingdom
This is a very interesting film taking both the point of view of a sixteen year old school boy and that of a middle aged teacher, with you dear viewer, playing yet another role. Ah ha, so, what we start with is a perhaps knowingly voyeuristic homework task set by the bored literacy tutor. Then we have the youth delivering precisely the kind of inflammatory story that reignites the tutor's interest. It's a dangerous game they both play - almost as if the boy were repeating the tutor's own youth with his post hoc adult knowledge. The innocents in this tale are ignored - or rather, their real stories are overlooked by both boy writer and his tutor whilst they play their silly game. The tutor's wife sees through the whole charade but then even her story is corrupted by inclusion in the boy's story-making. You, the viewer, need to pick carefully through the evidence you are presented. Do you want the boy to succeed? Do you want to encourage the teacher? Shame on you! You've gone down a garden path you should never have entered! Brilliant!
4 out of 5 people found the following review useful:
the power of literature, 3 March 2013
Author:
dromasca from Herzlya, Israel
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
'Dans la maison' ('In the House') directed by Francois Ozon is one of
the the most surprising films I have seen lately. Adaptation of a play,
the screen is so smart that my major question is how is it that Woody
Allen did not write it first? or maybe he wrote it under disguise?
It is really such an Allen-esque story, which mingles real life and
imagination, the writer as a creator of life, and life as a creator of
literature. It even has a thread about relations of adults and underage
and even if it loses a little bit of steam by the end, talking so much
about a good ending for the story that it forgets to create a real good
and non-conventional one, it is still one of the smartest and most
original scripts I have watched lately brought in screen. The hero is a
professor of literature Germain (Fabrice Luchini), smart enough to
abhor the re-introduction of uniforms in high school, whose literary
ambitions were not fulfilled and who finds a goal (and a change in the
routine) in pygmalionizing one of his pupils Claude (Ernst Umhauer) in
the ways of literature. As it happens Clude's subjects are his friend
and colleague Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), his house which is the middle
class dream for a poor kid from the peripheries, and his family or
especially his mother (Emmanuelle Seigner) who becomes the object of
his teenage dreams and guilty desires. As the story develops, the house
becomes the stage of the action, reality inspires fiction at first just
to make room for literary fiction becoming reality, the intervention of
the teacher becomes much more than correction of grammar or style, it
starts to be correction of destinies. All in a fluent and well paced
style for most of the time.
I liked the acting of Fabrice Luchini, well supported by other fine
actors as the two charming Kristin Scott Thomas (as his wife, co-reader
of Rapha's essays and supporting character playing eventually a
surprising role in the story) and Emmanuelle Seigner. All of them act
solidly, their problems are credible, and we can feel the atmosphere
and the torments of the middle class in the French province. The two
teenager roles are played with the natural touch and expected freshness
by Ernst Umhauer and Bastien Ughetto (the latest is very promising, may
he have luck in getting distributed in roles that fit his talent and
his face!). Overall it's a smart and funny movie, worth seeing for many
reasons.
2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
a perfect balance between suspense and entertainment, 7 May 2013
Author:
simona gianotti from Italy
There are certainly many meanings underneath the veil of comedy of this movie. Indeed, defining "Dans la maison" a comedy would be reductive, in the same way as thriller sounds out of tune. And it's really difficult to assign a precise category to it. It's a multifaceted movie, showing different levels of interpretation. From the point of view of the teacher, it's a subtle reflection of a middle aged failed man, who has to come to terms with his failure as a writer, and his incapability to inspire enthusiasm in class of bored students. From the point of view of the wives, it's a refined portrait of middle aged unsatisfied women, and their need to find any kind of escape or consolation. But above all, the movie offers a lucid and intelligent gaze on people's voyeuristic curiosity, on how much we are ready to do in order to see what happens behind closed doors and walls, and here the pair teacher-student works perfectly, and develops through the quick-paced writing of a story where the boundaries between reality and fiction become more and more faded, thus making it intriguing and engrossing. On this aspect, the movie is also a reflection on the process itself of artistic creation, which can seduce the reader or the viewer with an incredible power of attraction. A movie which certainly offers a perfect balance between suspense and entertainment, supported by a talented young and mature cast, involving the viewer till the utmost, and moving us to an unpredictable and gripping finale.
2 out of 2 people found the following review useful:
Normal life can be the most fascinating drama, 16 March 2013
Author:
dalydj-918-255175 from Ireland
*** This review may contain spoilers ***
"Sometimes we go to far into a fantasy that we both imagine and create
images in storytelling for ourselves. In the House is this all in one
showing the audience the mind of a teenager who is really his teacher
but younger"
Usually when I see films no matter what language they are in about the
intellectual mind of youth I become uninterested quickly having to hear
these young people talk about what they believe to be right but with
this film I was never ever to take my attention firstly from the
dialogue that was being spoken on screen as well as being told in such
a way that up until near the end I was unaware if what I was being
shown was a story created by the young Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer) or
if it really was a real look into this normal seeming family that
turned out to have so many twists and turns to the Artole family.
Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is a french teacher who along with his wife
Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) seem to take pleasure in stories being
told by the young Claude about his love for Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner)
and his exploration into the Artole family.
I was mesmerized by the story of the film having it mostly take place
in a house where some of the quiet moments where the most stunning and
effective moments of the film such as the image of a committed suicide
which turned out to be false which really changed my idea of the story
being told by this young boy. With the Artole family looking normal to
outsiders then to have such inner family drama was a great advantage to
the family with the idealisation of Esther being both beautiful and
being the emotional part of the film since this young confused boy
seemed to be pushed into the house by his teacher who could not but
correct this young boy. The reactions from Germain and his wife Jeanne
were also great as they started to question whether these stories were
true or if they were figments of this boys imagination.
Fabrice Luchini played Germain and his performance called for him to
both be reactive and forward in his actions how he inspired the young
Claude. He was the standout of the film for me and I was very impressed
by his performance in scenes such as his fight with his wife when he
read the final part of the Artole story and finding out his wife's
truth almost badly hurting her was very intensely played by Luchini.
Ernst Umhauer played the young Claude and this could be considered a
breakout for him as he both radiated on the screen as well as having
such a natural presence as the character. He was given a lot of simple
scenes to played and his performance was really strong and never became
cliché in any way. Kristin Scott Thomas plays Jeanne and she is
probably one of the best working actresses and this is another example
of her talent in her own language. She may have not have had the most
challenging role but she was perfect in everything. The only other
actor to mention is Emmanuelle Seigner as Esther and she had the most
subtle role as she was idealized through the writing and she was both
beautiful and heartbreaking by the end of the movie.
A strong movie by François Ozon obviously based on a play but still
having a cinematic feel with strong visuals and a great and fascinating
look into a middle class family through the head of a creative young
boy.
MOVIE GRADE: B+ (MVP: Fabrice Luchini)
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