Every day, AlloCiné recommends a film to (re)watch on TV. Tonight: Fabrice Luchini in a thriller by François Ozon.
While reading the play by Spanish playwright Juan Mayorga, The boy in the back row (El chico de la ultima filain original version), François Ozon immediately detects a potential in it – that of being able to talk indirectly about his work, about cinema, about what a creator and a spectator are.
He delivered a free adaptation of it in 2012. In the house follows Claude, a brilliant 16-year-old student, who interferes in the house of a student in his class, and tells the story in his essays to his French teacher. . The latter then regains a taste for teaching, but this intrusion will trigger a series of uncontrollable events.
Dans la maison shines particularly for its story, simple and gripping, which keeps the spectator in suspense until the end. On the casting side, in addition to the performance of Fabrice Luchini (whom the director had already directed in Potiche), let’s mention the young Ernst Umhauer, perfect in the skin of a gifted and manipulative high school student.
Drawing from the greatest filmmakers – from Hitchcock to De Palma via Pasolini -, François Ozon signs a voyeuristic and unhealthy film that is disturbing to say the least, whose narrative structure skilfully blurs reality and fiction while distilling a good dose of suspense.
In the House by François Ozon with Fabrice Luchini, Ernst Umhauer, Kristin Scott Thomas…
Tonight on Arte at 8:55 p.m.