In the House (2012)

François Ozon's In the House is a tidy, chilly machine about a sixteen-year-old named Claude who talks his way into a classmate's family and then writes about it, week by week, for the amusement of his literature teacher. Germain is bored and vain, and the boy's essays give him back a reason to live. The film watches this arrangement with the patience of a man inspecting a piece of furniture for hidden drawers. It is about storytelling as trespass, and it has no interest in improving anybody.

Where the film does trip the instruments, it does so faintly, and in the key of appetite. Claude's sexuality is ambiguous, and the fixation between him and his teacher carries a homoerotic charge that the camera does not bother to deny. This is not advocacy. It is atmosphere, the humid air of a story about desire and control, and it arrives without a single speech about identity or acceptance. The film is far too pleased with its own mischief to stop and explain itself.

Elsewhere the ledger is blank. The women here are surfaces and appetites, props in a boy's composition. Race goes unmentioned. Class exists only as the texture of a bourgeois living room. Nobody worries about the planet, the body, the brain, or the past. And Germain, for all that he teaches literature, never once turns to the audience to instruct it. His only sermon concerns the pleasure of a good sentence, which is a sermon this critic can sit through. The film is elegant, cruel, and entirely innocent of the era's moral vocabulary.

Thematic tags: none apply. The screenplay derives from a stage play, which falls outside the adaptation categories under consideration, and the film won no Academy Award and reached no domestic box office summit. It stands alone, unsequeled, unremade, and unburdened by real events or capes.