A 'House' Divided, Over Stories Lived And Told
Could it also be the story of a childless middle-aged man trying to plug the holes in his life by vicariously writing the great novel he couldn't pull off himself? Definitely. Is there a thread about the infinite human capacity for self-deception and betrayal covering for the desperate need to find a safe berth in life? Sure.
In the House is often mordantly funny. Luchini is France's master of deadpan comedy: When he does farce, it carries an undertow of sorrow, and vice versa. Scott Thomas, too often unimaginatively cast as sour or depressed viragos, holds her own beautifully as the vinegary, ambitious Jeanne. Through her, Ozon has some fun with contemporary art; he also pokes entertainingly at the puffed-up rhetoric of France's current educational-reform conversation. Germain may roll his eyes at his principal's rapturous endorsement of school uniforms as the way forward, but he remains passionate about literature; any teacher would understand his pouncing on promise, though they might balk at the lengths he will go to to promote it.
So everyone in this movie is plausible. But are they real, or figments of a budding writer's hungry imagination, fed by an enabler with his own unacknowledged desires? A blizzard of multiple perspectives and tonal shifts is set off by Philippe Rombi's lovely score, by turns exuberant, ferocious and wistful.
Ozon keeps sliding between genres ("Now we are in bad farce," scolds the teacher) to explore what really interests him — the creative process itself. He's forever knocking us off the naturalist's perch, and it's not just the plot that keeps getting re-engineered. The movie keeps asking us to reconsider who's the audience for this endlessly revised tableau. Is it us, or the writing partners, or the spouses — or all of the above?
Most important, at least for Ozon: Who's the author? In the House posits the artist as a kind of predator, at once monstrously detached and hopelessly overinvolved, preying on his material and ruining his subjects' lives for the sake of a good yarn. I can't decide whether that's wise or merely clever.
At the end, Germain and Claude sit side by side, competitively lathering up tales about the people they see through the windows of an apartment building across the park. There's a sense in which both bedraggled men have lost everything, and an even more powerful sense that telling stories — making art, if you want to get fancy — doesn't just mean the world to them. It is their world. (Recommended)