Movie: Dans la maison (In the House) 2012

In the House starts innocently. We see a bespectacled teacher sitting and eating a snack absentmindedly. He is listening to the Principal make a speech about introducing uniforms.He does not share the Principal’s enthusiasm that uniforms will bring another level of equality in the school.But it is this elusive sense of equality that is one of the cornerstones of this very engaging and inventive new film by Francois Ozon.

We see Germain (Fabrice Lucini),a somewhat frustrated school teacher trying to teach his teenaged students to write.He is meeting with very little success.We see him grading compositions at home.He has asked his class to describe their weekend.All he gets from most are couple of lines about pizza and TV.The students lack of writing skills is matched only by their lack of imagination.In the midst of these still born assignments he finds one which actually has two pages of writing.He begins to read it aloud to his wife Jeanne(Kristin Scott Thomas).This is one of the ways in which they engage with each other in middle age, without children or cats.The writer is an average boy called Claude(Ernst Umhauer) who writes about his visit to his friend Rapha’s (Bastien Ughetto) house.It should not amount to much except for the fact that its written in good quality prose and suggests that Claude is manipulating Rapha.

Claude has been watching the house for sometime and has finally managed to gain entry in the guise of trying to help Rapha with his math.Claude comes from a broken family and lives alone with his handicapped father is a run down apartment.He is curious about what happens in the perfect looking homes of the middle class. In his first essay he describes Rapha’s mother Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner) lounging on a sofa, smelling like a middle class woman.The description is at once disturbing and erotic.He signs off his essay ”to be continued”.Its almost like the pilot for a juicy soap opera.

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http://mostlycinema.com/2013/04/08/in-the-house-2012-original-french-title-dans-la-maison/