A 'House' Divided, Over Stories Lived And Told

Bored high school English teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini) encourages a talented student to exploit a classmate's family for literary inspiration.

Cohen Media GroupAmong the semi-literate journals submitted by his high-school students, jaded French literature teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini) is jazzed to find a rough diamond from a new pupil, Claude (Ernst Umhauer).

In weekly installments, the ingratiating but enigmatic teenager, who looks as though he just stepped out of a Pasolini movie, chronicles his efforts to insinuate himself into the family of one his classmates, an amiable but awkward underachiever named Rapha (Bastien Ughetto).

Recognizing a potential talent, Germain, a failed novelist and champion of the classics, begins to nurture the boy's efforts while reading his escapades aloud to his increasingly fascinated wife, Jeanne, who runs the kind of art gallery that exhibits Hitler figures with breasts. (She's played by Kristin Scott Thomas, spraying wry asides in spotless French.) From a literary standpoint, the couple doesn't seem well-matched. Also, they lack passion.

Claude's motives for horning in on the Raphas' lives — he has a roaring crush on the voluptuous mother, Esther, nicely played by Emmanuelle Seigner, also known as Roman Polanski's wife — turn out to be more murky than even this calculating youngster knows. Inevitably, his sojourn among the Raphas (ostensibly as a math tutor) alters the course of their relatively untroubled existence.