Butler's Cinema Scene

Ernst Umhauer and Fabrice Luchini

“IN THE HOUSE” My rating: B (Opening May 17 at the Tivoli and Glenwood Arts)

105 minutes | MPAA rating: R

It’s not a thriller, exactly, but the French release “In the House” has a way of toying with its audience that reminds of Hitchcock at his most perverse.

And when it’s all over you’re not exactly sure what you’ve seen. Which is exactly the point.

On the outside, anyway, the latest film from writer/director Francois Ozon (“Under the Sand,” “8 Women,” “Swimming Pool,” “Potiche”) doesn’t seem particularly threatening.

It begins in a French high school where middle-aged language arts teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini) finds himself once again confronted by a crop of bonehead students who would rather doze than contemplate Flaubert.

Assigned to write essays on how they spent their weekend, the young dullards respond with four-sentence “compositions.” But there is one ray of hope in this dreary bunch, a young man named Claude (Ernst Umhauer) who turns in a provocative paper about going to the home of fellow student to tutor him in math.

On the surface, this seems  unremarkable and innocent.

Yet Germain senses something disturbing and compelling in Claude’s penetration of a pristine suburban home that he has often dreamed of entering.  Claude may be there for a legitimate reason — to tutor his mathematically-challenged classmate Rapha (Bastien Ughetto) —  but he’s also an interloper, a kid from the wrong side of the tracks who takes advantage of the situation to spy on the lives of his economic betters, to violate their privacy.

Emmanuelle Seigner, Ernst Umhauer

Still, the kid has a way with words, and Germain becomes his writing coach.

This is not entirely teacherly altruism. Truth is, Germain’s life is a gray as his wardrobe and he gloms onto Claude’s weekly reports with the intensity of a stay-at-home mom absorbing a TV soap opera. He even shares Claude’s essays with his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), who finds them rather sinister.

The kid certainly exhibits a twisted impishness. He’s scathing in his depiction of the thick-headed Rapha and his father, Rapha Sr. (Denis Menochet), both of them crazy for American basketball. And his feelings for Rapha’s home-décor obsessed mother (Emmanuelle Seigner) are — how shall we say? – inappropriate.

The contents of the essays are enacted on the screen, yet even as we watch we know they can’t be trusted. How much of this is real, and how much made up by Claude to please his teacher/mentor?

For all his dull exterior, Germain becomes  fiercely invested in Claude’s saga.  When Rapha’s parents threaten to suspend the tutoring sessions if their kid doesn’t ace his next math exam, Germain slips an advance copy of the test to Claude. He’s that desperate to keep new installments in the story coming.

Adapting Juan Mayorga’s play, Ozon plays with his audience in the same way that Claude seems to be playing with Germain.

For example, there’s the everything-perfect house Rapha and his family live in.  It looks like nothing I’ve ever seen before in a French film.  In fact, it might be part of a Hollywood back lot set, home to desperate housewives or Wally and the Beaver.

There are a lot of ideas kicking around here: class conflict, family dynamics, voyeurism, storytelling, manipulation. Plenty of issues, but no real resolution.

Which is OK. Most films feel obliged to spell everything out. “In the House” finds satisfaction in confusion.

| Robert W. Butler