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This is a review of In the House (Dans la maison) (2012)

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 April

* Contains spoilers *

This is a review of In the House (Dans la maison) (2012)

Another posting is a detailed attempt to understand what is happening in this film, but it is not a review – this is.

The story presents itself as an unfolding, a relationship between a teacher and a sixteen-year-old ‘learner’ (as the staff now have to call the pupils), in his class Sophomore C* at the Lycée Gustave Flaubert** : Germain (Fabrice Luchini), the teacher, first learns that he has this class (we know nothing about what else he does – whether, even, he teaches any other class) from Anouk, the school secretary (with whom, if not now, he has almost certainly had an affair).

Less interested in his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas) than in marking homework (does the affair with Anouk subsist, a diversion of Germain’s care and attention ?), he is excited by an account (marked à suivre, to be continued) of his weekend by a Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer) fully as much as if Claude had spied upon Germain’s thought, actions and life and written it up, gives it a B+, and shares it with Jeanne – she has to suspend her uncertainty about what will happen in the wake (pun intended !) of the death of Bruno, the owner of the gallery that she runs, whose funeral service Germain, kindly, declined to accompany her to.

Everything stems from these facts, Claude’s attitude(s), Germain’s obsessive fascination, and his continued sharing with Jeanne : it is almost as if, on one level, Claude is writing to Jeanne by the epistolary mediation of Germain, because, when Jeanne says that she is reminded of the fondness for gossip of her cousin in Yorkshire (which, I believe, explains why her accent in French is less tight than usual, because we are not meant to see her as native to this country), Germain opens his critique of the latest instalment from Claude by saying that he writes like ‘a provincial cousin’.

It is patent that Germain is forgetting who he is, what he is doing, and almost fictionalizing his own work as a teacher by devoting himself to a creative effort and a creator who, although good, do not objectively merit it, a risky projection, most likely, of the ambitions that he could not fulfil for himself as a writer.

Who is teacher, who is being taught lessons, and what of this family with which Claude involves Germain (and Jeanne, through him : at least twice, Claude asks Germain if he is showing the episodes to anyone else, who straightaway denies it, although he keeps trying to moderate by invoking the spectre What if someone else read this ?) ?

These are the essential questions that this film poses in three very good performances by the named characters, and also by the family whose house, lives and thoughts Claude effortlessly seems to infiltrate (reminiscent of the manipulation in Funny Games (1997) and, more recently, The Imposter (2012)) – they will not directly lead to the answers that I have found in this film, and, without them, the ending will only partly work.

Yet it is as striking as Ali Smith’s close to her stunning novel The Accidental, and, if a viewer is anything like me, he or she will want to watch a second time*** to track how its course as affected by knowing where it is going.


End-notes

* The French education system may have taken this from that of the States, or vice versa.

** There seems to be such an establishment in Rouen (where Flaubert was born, and died).

*** This film is, with its cinematic credentials in place, all about the watching that audiences do.


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KST with a Yorkshire cousin

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2012
(Click here to go directly to the Festival web-site)

3 April

* NB Spoiler City : What follows is not a review as such, and takes as read that the film has been watched and its plot is no surprise *

The closing shot of the film, before a screen comes across from left and right to meet at the point where a double shooting has taken place, shows a two-storey building with eight (or ten ?) sets of French doors onto balconies. Dusk has somehow fallen, and the lit-up windows are mini-screens or stages on which we witness dancing, sex, etc., and, in one case, first a man and then a woman being shot (top, second from left). Other stories for Scheherazade to tell...

The opening shots were of a boy of around sixteen dressing, first his muscular torso with no head, and he will turn out to be Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), but, by the time of the closing shot, we may even have forgotten how the film started, such has been our journey, circumscribed and maybe claustrophobic as its locations have been :

* In and around the Lycée Gustave Flaubert

* The flat of Germain (Fabrice Luchini) and his wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas)

* In and around the house of what comes to be called that of 'the Raphas' (Denis Ménocet (Rapha Artole père), Emmanuelle Seigner (Esther), and Bastien Ughetto (fils))

* In and around the gallery that Jeanne runs (and thinks of as hers), Labyrinthe du Minotaur (with all its echoes of Theseus and Ariadne, Minos, Pasiphaë, and Dædalus)

* Approaching and inside the complex that contains the basketball court

* Queuing outside and in the cinema

* Finally, just outside the Germains' flat (after we have been shown Garcia's house and him on a bus to the former)


That is the entire compass, I believe, of In the House (Dans la Maison) (2012), but one may not have realized as much in watching. Our cast, too, is quite narrow beyond those mentioned, being Anouk (the school's secretary), the headmaster, the twins Rosalie et Eugénie (both played by Yolande Moreau), and Bernard, the maths teacher whose test Germain 'steals'.


I hypothesize that :

* French forms of greeting apart, Germain and Anouk are (or have been) more intimate than just colleagues

* Even before the events unfold, nobody atthe school much liked Germain, who may have been reactionary (or otherwise caused conflict with authority)

* Jeanne has probably thrown herself into the gallery both because childless, and because of Germain's relative lack of interest in her and what she does (and maybe she, in her turn, was intimate with the former gallery owner Bruno, whose funeral Germain early does not attend, calling it 'a mass')

* Maybe some (or all) of this does not exist outside Germain's head in the present of the film, for the following reasons :


(1) As with Nabokov's Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Germain is fascinated by Garcia because of the latter's writing, and is a Germain Germain, seeking, as Humbert does, to be untruthful to himself about what the fascination is

(2) If Garcia = Germain, Germain projecting his desire and drive for good writing onto another part of himself that concocts an enticing supply (after all, although what he takes to be the inventiveness (if it is not autobiographical) of Garcia's writing keeps him interested, the writing itself (at best) shows promise, not great genius), he can distance himself psychologically, by entering a psychotic experience, from any or all guilt for attacking his wife, humiliating 'a learner', and stealing the maths test

(3) For all that we know, the return to school (and the announcement of the reintroduction of school uniform, complete with the prurience of seeing Garcia dressing) onwards is imagined, because Germain has already been suspended (and maybe is already at the Institut de la Verrière, the psychiatric provision where his other, younger, more promising self (Garcia) visits him) - the scene, shown to us and which Garcia tells him that he watched, with learners in everyday clothes strikes a strange note, which might suggest the unreality of the uniformed scenes

(4) If so, then he tells himself a story of his own being drawn in (perhaps as to the centre of a labyrinth, Ariadne's (Garcia's) string taking him to face the Minotaur monster at the heart of him / his life) to excuse the three culpable acts listed in (2), above, and to provide his internal rationale for being led on and on, as if like Macbeth or Othello, to his destruction

(5) Esther Artole tells Claude Germain that his thinking that he loves her is 'in his head' and irréelle, and he is only in proximity to her by having, in part, helped her son Rapha with unreal numbers (such as the square-root of -2) : if Germain is - as Beckettt says about his prime character in Company - devising it all for company, then his neglect of Jeanne becomes Claude's interest in getting close to and seeking to seduce Esther (with all her Old Testament echoes in a book of her own)


On quite another level, the film seems to present itself to us much like Woody Allen and Diane Keaton, trying to piece together the puzzle of what is happening in Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), and there is often its playful feeling to the unfolding of each instalment from Garcia and its reception by the Germains. On another, Garcia is not unlike the son in Benny's Video (1992), or another schemer in the rather dire Bel Ami (2012) (not to mention The Imposter (2012)).

If, though, Germain had his admission, prior to (on a 'straight' reading) or during which (on a reading where, as Germain showed on the blackboard, the conflict is within) Garcia is the internal enemy (= the younger writer who Germain once was, back to haunt him, but at the same time intrigue him), the film has a different character that fits the ending.

Perhaps consumed by his failure as a writer and being but a teacher (just as Jeanne's biological 'failure' may have caused her to seek a career), we may see Germain spurred to fond imaginings that turn toxic and bring / have brought his downfall, a little in the same way that a noise that we hear in sleep incorporates itself into a dream and then, at what seems a remove of time, appears to wake us.


Interestingly, I have now seen a variant of the landscape poster that is in @CamPicturehouse on Neil White's (@everyfilmteled's) web-site, which shows Garcia next to Germain on a bench, with the Rapha house foregrounded (and even with a Narnia-style lamp-post, which, rather, reminds me of Magritte and his anarchic Empire of Light paintings)...

We cannot see Garcia's face, but just look at the expression on Germain's, regarding him !


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