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.
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment