Found online:
Anthony Lane: "In the House" Review : The New Yorker, APRIL 29, 2013
"It seems not just against the odds but against the laws of nature that a film as bookish, as suburban, and as self-consciously clever as "In the House" should also be such fun. To make things even more unlikely, it's about a teacher, and the nearest it comes to an action sequence is when someone photocopies a math test. There is sex, of course, this being a French movie, but it's extremely brief, and, most outrageous of all, it occurs between two people who are married to each other. What, then, is the appeal?
Our unheroic hero is Germain (Fabrice Luchini), who teaches literature at the Lycée Gustave Flaubert—a first hint that the application of style, at whatever cost, will lurk at the movie's heart. Germain is married, childlessly, to Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas), who runs an art gallery. We sense an easy rapport between them; she doesn't object when he reads Freud's "Civilization and Its Discontents" in bed, and she enjoys listening when he comes home and reads out his pupils' essays to her, the better to grumble about the narrowness of their minds. But wait.
One essay is by a boy named Claude (Ernst Umhauer), who recounts that he went to see Rapha (Bastien Ughetto), a fellow-pupil, ostensibly to help with math homework. As Claude admits, however, he used to stand in the park opposite Rapha's place, the previous summer, and watch; now, "at 11 a.m., I rang the bell, and the house finally opened up to me." As Germain reads out these words, he pauses, and glances up at Jeanne. Imperceptibly, with excitable stealth, the camera starts to move, approaching each of them in turn. They, like us—like every listener since the Sultan who summoned Scheherazade—are being lured into the spinning of a yarn. The process is both ominous and funny, all the more so because we gather, from sticky experience, that the yarn will turn out to be a web.
Claude has more to report. He mentions "the singular scent of a middle-class woman," which emanates from Rapha's mother, Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner). One sniff is enough. Henceforth, in pursuit of her, Claude will return repeatedly to the scene of the crime—or, at least, of his voyeuristic sins—and try to transcribe, in a series of essays, both his exploits and the flux of his feelings. On the strength of these, Germain starts to coach him after hours, at school, arguing that Claude, as a type of proto-novelist, ought to refine his powers of description. The kid is told to write more coolly, then with more passion; like Flaubert, like Dostoevsky, and so on. We find ourselves, in other words, in a late-flowering offshoot of one of the great modernist ambitions, which reached full bloom in "Ulysses": the urge to try out every conceivable style, not as a show of skill but in a bid to grasp a world so rich and multifarious that it threatens, or rejoices, to elude our clutches. Truth is stranger than diction.
All of which makes "In the House" sound less like a movie and more like a novel itself. In fact, it is directed by François Ozon, who has ranged prolifically from bright pastiche, in "8 Women" and "Potiche," to grave studies of grief and desire, like "Under the Sand" and "Time to Leave." He has flirted with literary artifice before, in "Angel," but the result rang strangely and determinedly false. In the new film, though, his tuning is exact, his actors miss not a trick, and, without our really noticing, his story dances along at a rattling rate. Ozon, like Pedro Almodóvar, is too wise to look down on melodrama, and some of Claude's incursions into Rapha's family are pricked with unabashed suspense—helped by the shyly smiling Umhauer, whose performance as Claude lies within stroking distance of devilry, with the cheekbones to match.
Luchini makes the ideal foil, for, as Germain, he clings to the softest of delusions—the idea that, if you've read enough books, you are cushioned against the shocks of body and soul, and are obviously too astute to wind up as a dupe. Eyes widening behind his glasses, he digs himself irretrievably deep into the fates of the other characters, and lets go of his own. The most urgent debt here is to "Céline and Julie Go Boating," the Jacques Rivette film in which two young women keep entering a house of mystery and staggering out again, a while later, as if high on pure narrative. As for Ozon's final image, it nods in glowing tribute to "Rear Window." The house of fiction, as Henry James said, has many windows, front as well as rear, and "In the House" stares through just one of them, at a minor crisis in the life of the bourgeoisie. Yet the view it affords is at once so silvery-clear and so misted with longing and confusion that, unexpectedly, it draws us close to heartache. Germain is a hero of sorts, by the end, because he has the courage to lose everything to our unhealable human sickness: the need to know. "
http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/cinema/2013/04/29/130429crci_cinema_lane?mobify=0
