In the House (2012)

IN THE HOUSE  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Francois Ozon
    Fabrice Luchini, Ernst Umhauer, Kristin Scott Thomas,
    Emmanuelle Seigner, Denis Ménochet, Bastien Ughetto
The French seem to like these movies about writers where what the writer writes and what the movie does with it puts a blurry spin on the distinction between fiction and reality. This one starts out with a high-school teacher who has his students write an essay about how they spent their weekend. Most are negligible and some are just plain bad, but one catches the teacher's eye: a first-person account by a boy named Claude about how he managed to slip into a classmate's house. The essay ends with the words "to be continued." The kid clearly has talent, and the teacher finds the essay both intriguing and a little disturbing. So the kid writes more installments (always "to be continued") with the teacher's advice and encouragement. The teacher shares them with his wife. And the teacher, the wife, the classmate and the classmate's family all get caught up in the story, both on the page and away from it. There's a significant ethical lapse on the part of the teacher that should be fatal to the film, but by the time it occurs, the movie has started slipping into who-knows-what's-real territory anyway. It's either creepy in a funny kind of way, or funny in a creepy kind of way, depending on your point of view. And you end up wanting to know, almost as much as the teacher does, how it's going to play out, in the story the kid's writing, or the story that's playing out around the story the kid's writing, or, you know, whatever.