In 2007, in Angel, François Ozon portrayed himself as an Edwardian novelist. Five years later, the filmmaker in his forties presents himself as a 16-year-old high school student with the obsolete and androgynous first name of Claude. Despite the blond waves of the hair and the adolescent youth of the body, the doubt is quickly dispelled: Claude’s determination to shape reality according to his fantasies, his ambivalence towards the beings to whom he gives a second life by making them characters, all that furiously reminds François Ozon.
Claude is therefore a 2nd year student at the Lycée Gustave-Flaubert, in an undefined suburb. And Professor Germain Germain (Fabrice Luchini) finds himself facing a class of uniform mediocrity. All young people are calves, he sighs to his wife, Jeanne the gallery owner (Kristin Scott Thomas). All ? Except one, Claude Garcia (Ernst Umhauer), who, to the injunction “Tell your weekend”, responds with the story of a fraudulent intrusion into the home of one of his comrades, which he ends with a “to follow” teaser.
The first time that Fabrice Luchini reads a text by his student, we only hear the reader’s wonderfully evocative voice. But, from the second episode, Ozon stages the adventures of Claude. It was as a buyer of a ticket for Dans la maison that we entered the interior of Germain and Jeanne, in the classroom of the Lycée Flaubert. It is as a reader of Claude’s copies that we discover another interior, which Ozon films in such a way as to leave a slight doubt as to its reality.
A maze of mirrors
Coming from a miserable family that we will only glimpse, Claude became fascinated with a “normal” family, that of his comrade Raphaël Argol, called “the Raphas”, since the father gave his first name to his son. From his first text, Claude evoked “the perfume of a middle-class woman” exhaled by Esther (Emmanuelle Seigner), Rapha’s mother.
François Ozon thus constructs a labyrinth of mirrors: the sequences in the Rapha house are subject to criticism by Germain Germain. Soon, Claude amends his texts accordingly, and Ozon puts them back on stage. The truth of the facts leaves room for an infinity of possibilities: is it Rapha who is in love with Claude, or the latter who desires Esther? Has Germain taken an erotic liking to his pupil, or is he looking for a surrogate son?
These capital problems are treated with a light and cruel irony. Ozon found in Ernst Umhauer one of those rare adolescent actors who can worry without terrorizing. With Kristin Scott Thomas, impeccable as an almost surly wife, they contain the excesses of Fabrice Luchini. So much so that the teacher becomes a very human monster, carried around by this student who has become his master. Ozon achieves the feat of dismantling the toy of fiction without breaking its engine: emotion.