‘In the House’
Director: Francois Ozon
Stars: Fabrice Luchini, Ernst Umhauer
Rating: R
3 (out of 5) globes

Once upon a time, Francois Ozon ruled the art house. A self-styled enfant terrible of French and international cinema, he made maddeningly elusive art films (“See the Sea”), tackled unfilmed scripts by Rainer Werner Fassbinder (“Water Drops on Burning Rocks”) and gained the trust of aging matrons like Charlotte Rampling (“Under the Sand,” “Swimming Pool”) and Catherine Deneuve et al (“8 Women”). But “enfants” grow up — or at least their audiences do. Ozon’s work in the last decade hasn’t attracted nearly the attention it did previously, and Ozon’s career is the type where every new film is dubbed a comeback, even if it’s just another perfectly adequate addition to an oeuvre that will look impressive in retrospect.

Ozon’s latest “comeback” — after 2010’s well-liked “Potiche” — is his most overtly playful since his heyday. Fabrice Luchini plays a high school lit and composition teacher bored with his career and bored with his pupils. Upon discovering that one of them, the remote Claude (Ernst Umhauer), is actually a promising man of letters, he latches onto him and gives him an assignment: worm his way into the lives of a jock and his parents to see what constitutes the “perfect” family. (That the “perfect mom” is played by Emmanuelle Seigner, aka Mrs. Roman Polanski, is one of the film’s better jokes.) Claude’s reports on his findings, with him uncovering not a few sneaky transgressions, turn into serials, which Germane reads with the lip-smacking expectation of a stay-at-home parent watching his “stories.” But is Claude making it up?

If “In the House” is a return to form — and it’s worth noting that 2007’s “Angel,” which went unaccountably straight to video in the U.S., is rather excellent — it’s a reminder that said form was rarely much more than pleasant, and often self-satisfied to a fault. Like much Ozon, “House” rides out an amusing premise without deviating much from the course. Once you get what Claude, and the film, is doing — which holds back considerably more than his other, nastier suburban assault, 1998’s “Sitcom” —there’s not much to expect beyond predictably “unpredictable” twists. Also like past Ozons, there’s always the acting, never not lovely, with a never-better Luchini paired nicely with an inevitably Kristin Scott Thomas-y Kristin Scott Thomas as his contemporary art gallery-running wife. (Cue easy jokes about contemporary art.) That Ozon is actually hugely compassionate towards his suburban targets, moreso than those intruding upon them, is both good and less good.

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Robert Koehler estimates he watched between 100 and 120 films for the current iteration of “Rendez-Vous With French Cinema.” Koehler — who, with the estimable Kent Jones, took over as program director of the Film Society at Lincoln Center from Richard Peña, who stepped down last year — did this all himself. He had no aides.

The annual series, now in its 18th year and co-presented with Unifrance Films, is consistently one of the most popular regular programs at the Film Society at Lincoln Center. The two dozen titles that made the cut serve, as it always has, to familiarize audiences with the current cinema of another country. But Koehler wanted to do things slightly different this year.

“What I wanted to do,” he explains, “is broaden the focus just a little bit to capture every shade of French cinema, from the most independent and, if not experimental, then semi-experimental to the most commercial, star-studded box-office comedy.”

Granted, he doesn’t go to the absolute extremes of the French mainstream. Missing, although perhaps not tragically, is the latest “Astérix and Obélix” live-action blockbuster, a series that makes crazy money at home (and in Europe) but has never once been exported stateside. Gallic comedy doesn’t always translate stateside — never released here either is “Welcome to the Sticks,” the highest grossing homegrown film in French history —but Koehler is confident in the few yukfests he’s programmed. That includes actor-director Bruno Podalydès’s “Granny’s Funeral,” about a man’s awkward attempts to make funeral arrangements for the grandparent he barely knew.

As promised, the rest of the “Rendez-Vous” slate is a mix. There are films with names (Jeanne Moreau in “A Lady in Paris”; Nils Arestrup in Closing Night Film “You Will Be My Son”; etc.). There are new films by name directors, including “In the House,” the latest from François Ozon. Ozon was once the enfant terrible of French cinema, with “See the Sea,” “Criminal Lovers” and “Swimming Pool.” He’s been quiet of late, and his films, even the good ones like 2007’s “Angel,” have not garnered the attention he once commanded so easily. But “In the House,” about a promising high school student who infiltrates an allegedly normal suburban family at the behest of his lit teacher (Fabrice Luchini), is playful in a manner different from past Ozons, and loops in a predictably winning Kristin Scott Thomas for good measure.

Of equal, if not greater, interest are the films by neophytes. This year’s slate has a number of first-time films. “French cinema is really being regenerated and revived by a young generation of filmmakers who are thinking way outside the box,” Koehler says. “They’re much more personal and they can’t be identified as French in the clichéd way. They’re films that cross cultural borders. They draw stylistic tendencies from Asia and Latin America, and have transformed these tendencies into their own personal work.”

Koehler cites Shalimar Preuss “My Blue Eyed Girl” and Héléna Klotz’s “The Atomic Age,” a 65-minute experimental narrative with fluctuating sexuality he says “sneaks up on you,” as two films that represent the Janus faced nature of new French cinema: looking forward while facing backwards at the same time. Not that he wants to call it a New Wave: “Don’t call it a Wave. That term should be buried and dead.”

There are also a few older films, paired with newer films in the program. One of the more anticipated films on tap is “Renoir,” a biopic about the painter Auguste Renoir spending time with his son Jean, when he was still young and not yet aware he would become a great artist, too. Renoir the Younger’s 1951 classic “The River,” a Technicolor beaut about a Western family in India, will be screened from a new restoration. And because there will be shown the last film from the late Claude Miller, “Thérèse Desqueyroux” — starring Audrey Tautou — the series also boasts the 1962 version of the same François Mauriac novel. Directed by Georges Franju (“Eyes Without a Face”), it features a younger Emmanuelle Riva, late an Oscar nominee for “Amour.”

“France is still the most vibrant, most wide-ranging and possibly most vital of the national cinemas in Europe,” Koelher says. Even as the cinema, like economies and people, crosses borders into other countries, France still has a toe in tradition. “There’s still a distinct national voice that goes back to the origins of cinema. The first films were made there, after all.”

For the full lineup click here.

If You Go:
“Rendez-Vous With French Cinema”
Through March 10
At the Film Society of Lincoln Center, BAM and IFC Center”
$10-$15

http://rendezvouswithfrenchcinema.com/

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