François Ozon’s latest film is one of his best. Some of his previous works have betrayed a taste for the hectic and the farcical, while others have crept toward a more insidious darkness; here, for once, the two impulses are fused.
Fabrice Luchini – a born stooge of dramatic fate, never more so than when he tries to control it – stars as Germain, a literature teacher in a French lycée, who feels compelled by the essays of a precocious pupil named Claude (Ernst Umhauer). At first, he merely corrects them, and advises on style; soon, however, he is drawn into the experiences that they record – the life, and the love life, of a bourgeois family, and its vulnerability to Claude’s mysterious intrusions. Or are they nothing worse than teen-age fantasies
The result is endlessly playful, although the rules of the game, in Ozon’s hands, could hardly be graver, and what can be at stake, in the act of storytelling, has seldom been more elegantly sketched. Kristin Scott Thomas also stars, as Germain’s wife – calmer than her foolish husband, but no less beckoned by the lure of words.”
– Anthony Lane, The New Yorker
Official Trailer