“In the House” balances beautifully the two things that French filmmakers do best — substantial natural dialogue and that singular sexuality inevitable in Francophone work — while reattributing them to a very different kind of story. Far from the Nouvelle Vague “Breathless” couples and quasi-sex-fantasy Brigitte Bardot fodder of the ’50s and ’60s, “In the House” centers on a middle-aged teacher, a wry schoolboy and a model French family.
The film is the narrative of creating the story of these people — the student, teacher and family — and of the disturbing intrusions made into each other’s lives (and houses) to do so. Claude Garcia, his wit unsatisfied, entices his teacher (himself frustrated by the limitedness of his class and aching for inspiration) with a story “to be continued” to take him on as a personal pupil. However, what is “to be continued” from the first installment of Garcia’s story ends up being much more engrossing and unexpected than what it was initially.
The story Garcia writes is of his own writing about a family — the family, specifically, of his classmate Rapha Artole. Coming from a less-than-ideal family life himself, Garcia is drawn to the impressive normality of Rapha and his loving parents, whom he sees pick up their son from school. He wants to know, “How is the house of a normal family?” Garcia’s aim in writing is to answer this question. However, as the story is more encouraged by the teacher, Germain — who wants to foster the boy’s talent — as well as Garcia’s own changing desire to stay in the house, he can no longer just enter “in the house” but be there many times to experience it and be near the subjects of his story. As Germain takes the boy and the story under his passionate wing, Garcia and Germain begin to take real risks for the story.
It is around the time that Garcia and Germain realize that Garcia’s presence in the house is contingent on more than just the story but his urge for Esther, Rapha’s mother, whose “singular scent of a middle class woman … caught (his) attention.” What began as a cynical young man objectively investigating his classmate’s family turns into something much more involved and much more complicated.
With this break from objectivity, the reality of the story becomes compromised. While Garcia begins to toy with different plot twists in his story, the film itself becomes decidedly less realistic. Suddenly, characters are absurdly placed in scenes and narrate it from within. Desires are exhibited as real in the plotline of the movie but turn out to be cinematic flourishes. Scenes flash from real to unreal, and the line between the two — both Garcia’s story and the story of the movie, as well as the reality and unreality of the movie scenes themselves — becomes hazy.
As the narrative continues, the fiction interludes becomes less strikingly implausible, as one begins to take in the movie as if in a lucid dream: noticing that there has been a skip in logic but accepting the change as the only way the story could have gone on. Garcia contemporaneously writes his story as he lives it — whether the living or the writing comes first is less clear in the film. This confusion ultimately leads to a grab-bag of endings for the story, all unclear as to their ultimate reality, save for one ending which Garcia intends for his story and which is shown on the screen.
In that penultimate scene, however, the audience can never really be sure whether that ending to the story ever really happened or whether the story simply continued on. Thus, the clash of intention, reality, desire and fiction rocks Garcia and Germain’s determination of the story and, ultimately, of their own lives. Just as they lose the determining grip on the ending of their story, so too does the audience lose a grip on the veracity of the story they’re being told. It is that doubt, that confusion, that adds on to the given benefits of brilliant acting, je-ne-sais-quoi French sexual fever and substantial dialogue that make “In the House” such a brilliant existential narrative experience.
Contact AJ Kantor at [email protected].