In the House movie review & film summary (2012)

Before long, Germain is tutoring Claude just as Claude is tutoring Rapha. As a frustrated writer, he attempts to help Claude develop his skills and talents by analyzing, criticizing and guiding the story as the boy produces new chapters. But Jeanne wonders if, perhaps, he has developed a sexual fixation on his protégé. After one of Claude’s erotic installments, Germain takes him to task: “The latent desires of the perfect family? The father, the mother, the son — is this Pasolini?” (I love a good “Teorema” joke.) 

Meanwhile, Jeanne curates a struggling gallery called the Minotaur’s Maze, after the mythological dual-natured man-beast. Her increasingly desperate attempts to procure popular work raises issues of what is art and what is simply commercial manipulation — questions Germain also raises about Claude’s work. Is the goal of his writing to create literature or to compete with Barbara Cartland? 

And then Germain starts to appear in the story, commenting on it and suggesting revisions while it is in progress. The voyeuristic aspect of Claude’s story is essential to its appeal, and one of the illicit pleasures of storytelling and moviemaking in general, but voyeurs are inevitably implicated in what they see. Eventually, Germain becomes an active participant in the story, so involved in its creation and cultivation that he conspires with the writer not only to change events in the story but to take questionable actions in his life outside the story to help it continue …  which then become new wrinkles in the story.  

“In the House” might well be called “In the Story” because that’s where it plays out: the house in the story and the story in the house. Ozon has great fun finding cinematic ways to toy with narrative devices, so that the house also becomes a metaphor for the story, with its various levels, compartments, pillars, stairways, partially open doors, mirrors and that Claude can use to observe what’s happening. (We can see him watching and listening — but can they?) It’s telling, then, that Madame Artole is preoccupied with remodeling her house, which is perhaps the same as wanting to rewrite her own story. By the end, “In the House” becomes a remodeled “Rear Window.”

Yes, but is it art? In certain respects, the viewer of “In the House” is put in some of the same positions as the characters. To me, the film seems pretty slight and maybe a bit too literal (it’s based on a play by Spanish writer Juan Mayorga). After a while, it seems to run out of places to go, but for most of its running time, it’s a wickedly clever divertissement.

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