In the house: François Ozon has an undeniable talent as a storyteller (critical)

The thriller with Fabrice Luchini will return to television tonight.

Arte will rebroadcast tonight In the House, by Francois Ozon. The story of Claude, played by the young Ernst Umhauer, is a particularly brilliant and manipulative 16-year-old student. This year, it was his French teacher, Fabrice Luchini in the role of Germain, that he decided to teach. Each week, he intrudes a little more into the Artole family home and offers a surprisingly detailed account of it to Germain. Faced with such a talent for writing, the teacher is amazed and regains a taste for teaching. But the more time passes, the more the young boy interferes in the private life of strangers, which will trigger a series of uncontrollable events…

My Crime: A Delightfully Playful Ozon (review)

Very invested in this project, Luchini could not help improvising and adding sentences to his text. So much the better: the result rings true. In the house had largely conquered First when it was released, in 2014. Here is our review.

It goes without saying that François Ozon has an undeniable talent as a storyteller that this latest delivery cannot upset. Dans la maison takes up a perilous challenge with ease: the filmmaker indeed juggles with the fantasies of the reader (Luchini) and those of the editor-manipulator (Ernst Umhauer, who possesses the required elegance and perversity) and immediately takes game, the spectator by the collar. What ends up however seizing up the machine a little, it is the chronic superficiality of the realizer, regularly eaten from the inside by his shortcomings of smart guy sure of his effects and conscious of their limits. Because the film is quickly partitioned into an exercise in tasty autoparody (but for once quite predictable), in which the figures of the master (good critic but poor writer) and the pupil (little immature genius) constitute the alpha and the omega of a cinema in chronic deficit of substance.