Lorna Irvine is disappointed with Francois Ozen's latest film.
A fascinating premise for a film, this sadly gives French farce a bad name. Director Francois Ozon, who usually has smart, attractive older women as his focal point, comes a cropper with this comedy drama, his thirteenth feature based on a Spanish play by Juan Mayora, The Boy In The Last Row, where a bored school teacher nurtures his talented but devious pupil into writing voyeuristic essays and wrecks two families' lives in the process. Here, the women provide little but wish fulfilment.
Germain, a stickler for tradition in a school obsessed with political correctness, is an uptight neurotic figure who regards the kids as ''barbarians''. Fabrice Luchini, well-cast as the gloomy teacher, with a permanent raincloud expression regards first the damage caused from the monster he has created in protégé Claude and also the widening rift of his own marriage and career.
Sixteen year old Claude, well portrayed by newcomer Ernst Umhauer, writes imaginative, witty essays on a seemingly perfect middle-class couple: Esther, on whom he has a crush, and her husband Rapha Snr. They are the parents of geeky Rapha Jr. (a brilliant Bastien Ughetto), whom he befriends in order to sneak into their home and seduce Esther- but how much is Claude's imagination and what is real?
The supporting cast are very good- Kristin Scott Thomas giving good Kristin Scott Thomas as usual, doing that brittle, take no shit thing she does as Jeanne, Germain's wife. Emmanuelle Seigner is fine, given the limitations she has to work within as the fantasy figure of Esther, likewise Rapha Snr, her husband (Denis Menochet) a slightly foolish figure with his pronouncements on China as “the future,” macho love of sports and work-related fatigue.
A handsomely shot film, peppered with self-reflexive gags (“this is like a bad farce,” quips Germain) and cinematic or artistic references such as the nod to Hitchcock's Rear Window at the end and the Chapman Brothers' “shock” artwork in Jeanne's gallery, there are some witty moments but the tone becomes tiresome as jokes and absurd scenarios are stretched out beyond all credibility. Sadly no character, with the exception of poor downtrodden Rapha Jr, is truly sympathetic.
Voyeurism, complicity and the complacency of bourgeois lifestyles are only hinted at and could have been expounded on more. Not half as clever, or as funny, as it thinks it is, there is a hole in Ozon's layers.
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