Monday, February 18, 2013

DANS LA MAISON - French Movie - Review by Joe Calleri.


What – DANS LA MAISON (French Movie, as part of the 2013 French Film Festival).
Where – The Palace, Como, South Yarra.
When – Friday 15 February, 2013.
Reviewer - Joe Calleri.
Stars - 4.

Full Disclosure - I attended a preview of this movie as a media invitee.

Director, Francois Ozon’s tense, edge of your seat thriller, Dans La Maison (In The House), is an exploration of several dark themes including the subtly seductive power of the written word and of imagination, and the inevitable dangers that lurk when stronger minds and personalities dominate and manipulate weaker minds.

Germain (the wonderful, Fabrice Luchini) is a jaded, burnt out, secondary school literature teacher who complains about the lack of quality and imagination shown by his young students. Married to gallerist, Jeanne Germain (Kristin Scott Thomas), they are a childless, middle aged, upper middle class couple who live a seemingly comfortable, though unexciting life.

Enter Claude Garcia (menacingly portrayed by Ernst Umhauer), one of Germain’s teenage students. Germain reads to Jeanne, Claude’s essay on the theme of “What I did on the weekend”, an essay that ends “to be continued …”. Germain is impressed with the quality and tone of Claude’s unusual essay, and he and Jeanne become hooked to knowing more.

Claude writes of his observations of the apparently perfect family, the Artole’s: Esther (the delicate, Emmanuelle Seigner), her husband, Rapha (Denis Menochet) and their son, also named Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), whom Claude tutors in maths and slowly befriends.

We discover, however, that, Claude’s developing friendship with the younger Rapha is a sinister excuse for Claude to enter the Artole’s home and explore his dangerous, adolescent fantasies by voyeuristically observing the Artole’s (especially Esther), much as a social scientist would dispassionately observe and comment on the lives and interactions of a cross-section of people.  

Each story that Claude writes reveals more and more about the everyday details of the Artole’s lives. And, we discover that, the family is not as perfect as Claude may have thought. As the stories become more intimate and revelatory, so does the desperate Germain’s hunger grow insatiable for more stories from the young, talented writer, Claude.

So, when the manipulative Claude threatens to stop writing his fly on the wall stories unless Germain steals a maths test to help Claude and Rapha, Germain stupidly acquiesces to Claude’s request. This event triggers a tragic sequence of circumstances that leads to Germain losing everything in his life he holds dearest.

This is a subtle and beautifully crafted story full of menace and dark obsessions. Highly recommended.


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