In the House

Halfway through François Ozon’s flip­pant meta­farce In the House, Kristin Scott Thomas’ Jeanne, a sul­try, sil­ver-tongued art deal­er and wife to rat­ty, motor­mouthed lit­er­a­ture prof Ger­main (the great Fab­rice Luchi­ni), is seen wear­ing Annie Hall’s infa­mous beat­nik garb: puffy white shirt, bag­gy pants and beat-up waist­coat combo.

It’s a jokey ref­er­ence ally­ing the film to the chat­ter­ing-class whim­sy of Woody Allen. Except this film isn’t like Annie Hall. It has more in com­mon with Allen’s lat­er, more cyn­i­cal Decon­struct­ing Har­ry, espe­cial­ly in its clever clever dis­man­tling of the writ­ing process and the way in which it details the haz­ards of using real peo­ple as the basis for fic­tion­al subjects.

It all starts so promis­ing­ly, as the nat­u­ral­ly tal­ent­ed stu­dent Claude (Ernst Umhauer) sub­mits a cre­ative writ­ing assign­ment which tick­les Ger­main. It offers a caus­ti­cal­ly snide depic­tion of a sub­ur­ban mid­dle-class fam­i­ly which Claude has appar­ent­ly infil­trat­ed with the help of slack-jawed school­mate Rapha (Bastien Ughet­to). Pon­der­ing then swift­ly dis­miss­ing the ques­tion­able morals of this endeav­our, Ger­main decides to nur­ture Claude’s cre­ative instincts and mould him in his (failed) word­smith image.

Though spright­ly and urbane, In the House nonethe­less indulges in the mis­an­throp­ic, class-bait­ing excess­es of Ozon’s ear­ly work, but does so from behind the bar­ri­cades of its con­cen­tric lit­er­ary dimen­sions. By the time the worlds of fic­tion and real­i­ty begin to col­lide and the inevitable Frankenstein’s Mon­ster angle comes into play, the film spi­rals out of con­trol and squirms its way to a trite and unsat­is­fac­to­ry con­clu­sion. As a tech­ni­cal exer­cise, there’s a cer­tain lev­el of fun to be had, and the the­atri­cal, larg­er-than-life per­for­mances (par­tic­u­lar­ly Luchini’s) sug­gest it’s a film whose pre­ten­sions are per­haps not to be tak­en at face value.

In the House talks in hip, eru­dite tones but in fact appears to have lit­tle of val­ue to say. It suc­ceeds as emp­ty, glossy enter­tain­ment fuelled by a ver­i­ta­ble glit­ter-gun of bons mots, but for Ozon it’s some­thing of a step back after his lumi­nes­cent femme satire Potiche.