Dans la Maison (In the House) (戀錯隔離媽)

"There's no second take on life!". We see this message about the risk of drug addiction flashed on the television screen in bold white characters against a completely black background. But it's certainly not true "in" life as far as films are concerned. It happens all the time. I missed the film "Dan La Maison" at the FFF. I got a second take, at the IFC Palace last night. It's a film about another kind of addiction, an addiction which is invisible but no less powerful for being invisible. It's the addiction to the world of imagination, the world of make-belief, the world of which the cinema is the perfect embodiment. it's a film about how to make a story out of the trivialities of the quotidian life of a professor of French literature in a French high school, a precocious student with a gift for writing, the family of his classmate and that of the professor.

Based on a novel by the Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga "El chico de la última fila" (The Boy in the Back Row"), this latest film of French director Francois Ozon, starring Fabrice Luchini as Germain the literature professor, Ernst Umhauer as the would be student writer Claude Garcia, Kristin Scott Thomas as Jeanne, the wife of the professor who's running an art gallery on the brink of closing down, Bastein Ughetto as Claudes' classmate Rapha Artole, Denis Ménochet as Rapha's father, Emmanuelle Seigner as his wife Esther Artole, the story started when Germain discovered amidst the garbage that he got when he asked his literature class student to turn in an assignment over how they passed the weekend, a real gem which finished with the remark, "to be cont'd". It was the beginning of what promises to be an intriguing story about the life of the family of one of his classmates, Rapha. It was written by Claude. When asked to give his wife Jeanne a little attention over her headaches about her art gallery she had to undergo from the announcement by her twin sister bosses that unless she got some sales going within the next 30 days, they've have decided to close it down, Germain asked for a little time to finish correcting the "essays" turned in by his students. To allow her to pass the time with a little less stress, he started reading over to her whatever he was then reading and grading. She listened and appeared fascinated by Claude's story about what he observed in about the middle class lady exuding a certain charm whilst sitting in a certain posture at her house which she intended to decorate.

As the film develops, we see Germain giving Claude after class hours all kinds of novels to read including Flaubert's "Madame Bovary", Celine's "Journey into the end of the the Night" giving him all kinds of tips on how to introduce conflict and create dramatic clashes in the action to sustain the reader's attention and how to keep them in a kind of Hitchkokian suspense so that they would be sufficiently interested to continue reading. However to continue to write, Claude needed some pretext to go to to Rapha's house. He found a good one:  as Rapha was an idiot in maths, he would help him with his geometry and trigonometry. He succeeded . He continued writing, week after week, describing what he saw each week at Rapha's house paying particular attention to his developing feelings for Esther, Rapha's mother, a housewife who was always reading home decoration magazines for ideas about renovating her house and who gave up her ambition about being a designer once she had Rapha and who was constantly ignored by Rapha and his father who cared for nothing except basketball, either playing on weekends at the basketball court at nearby gymn, practicing shooting at a make-shift ring hung on the wall at his bed room or glued to the sofa like couch potatoes before the TV showing basketball games, with a photo of his hero Yiu Ming stuck to a corner of his computer monitor. We see the relevant images on the screen as Germain read over to Jeanne episode after episode of what Claude was writing as the film moves on "in real time". Eventually, Germain had to ask Claude to stop because he felt that if it continued, a real and possibly dangerous relation might develop between Claude and Esther. Jeanne was of the same opinion. But Claude refused, having gone so far. He felt he could no long stop now. Germain continued to read. Jeanne continued to listen. Then Rapha's father, who was always complaining about not being respected by his boss, had finally decided that he has had enough, decided to move the whole family to China to start a new life there by going into business on his own with a Chinese partner and Esther had to say farewell to Claude. When the film ends, we see Germain suspended from teaching for having stolen a maths paper which Claude needed to help Rapha got an A so that Claude could continue going to Rapha's house gain the confidence of Rapha's parents that his assistance, instead of that of an outside professional maths tutor, was of genuine help to Rapha. much to the surprise of Germain, Claude going to his house and seducing Jeane so that he might know what was going on "dans la maison" (inside the house) of his mentor. Interspersed between the episodes, we see Germain, Rapha and Claude in class, how Rapha felt humiliated as one of his essays was read and corrected in public, causing a complaint against Germain at the student newspaper which Claude helped Rapha to write or even more probably, which Claude wrote for Rapha and which precipitated an angry confrontation between Rapha's father and Germain at which he gave Germain a blow, another episode in which Rapha gave a blow to Claude for disclosing his feelings for Rapha's mother, various glimpses of Jeanne's at work in the gallery on the verge of collapse which appear to be an irionic dig at the flimsiness, the airiness, the pomposity, the vacuousness, the hypocrisy surrounding so-called "modern" or "post-modern" or contemporary art in which Jeanne's gallery was full of people viewing the works of an otherwise unknown Chinese artist whose tableaux consist of nearly identical frames with very little on them except some extremely fine blue and pink dot and other exhibits showing plastic models of male or female bodies with cut out or detached secondary adult sexual body parts. Is that postmodernist "play" or ironic comment upon art itself?

The film ends with a scene in which Claude sees the disheveled literature professor sitting alone in a park, having lost his job. The two raised their head and saw in front of them a modern apartment and within each lit apartment, they see different group of people and/or animals and they start inventing stories about what may possibly be happening with exactly the same pair of people; Obviously each imagined the stories differently, The film raises interesting questions. Is what Claude wrote "real" or the product of his creative imagination or partly "real" and partly "invented" or is the whole thing a complete invention? We would never know, as the story is told mainly from the point of view of Claude as writer of the "serial"  and we, as the audience, see nothing but what that "story" allows us to see as it unfolds before our eyes on the screen. We are entirely enclosed within that "invented" world: doubly invented because it's a  film is about a writer writing a story based on "real" life. We are three removes from "reality": what we consider as reality (our reality), Claude's narrative about that "reality" , the film (itself a created reality) about Claude's narration of that "reality": a typical postmodernist simulacra: a copy of a copy of a copy. In the end, there is nothing but images and copies, copies copying itself and "reality" has dissolved itself as the constant flickering of sight and the vibration of sound as "language" we experience in the darkened environment of house 4 of the IFC Palace Cinema.

It's an interesting film about story telling and the creative process and a reflection upon the boundaries between "reality" and "fiction" and "art" and how they may interpenetrate each other and how "imagination" may erupt into the "real" world with possibly "disastrous" results. Are the results "really" disastrous if it merely happens in a film? Are Claude and Germain both addicts of the dangerous game of writing as a way of probing into the secrets in the "real" life of people enclosed in the cubicles of an apartment in which all kinds of things happens between man and woman, man and dog, woman and woman, two men and one woman, two women and one man, man and child etc.? Whatever the "true" answers may be, if there is still meaning in that question, it certainly got the director François Ozon a Golden Globe at the San Sebastian Film Festival. I can see why: the acting of Luchini, Umhauer,Thomas, Ughetto and Seinger are uniformly good, the cinematography by Jérôme Alméras unobtrusive and the original music by Philippe Rombi excellent. In short, a film well worth seeing.