In The House, review - Telegraph Dir: François Ozon; Starring: Fabrice Luchini, Kristin Scott Thomas, Ernst Umhauer With In the House, French writer-director François Ozon continues his project to reframe or re-dress conventional narratives: you may recall his 2002 musical murder-mystery 8 Women, or 2004"s 5x2, with its love-match played out in reverse. Here, he's telling two stories, one born of the other. Jaded writer-turned-teacher Germain (Fabrice Luchini) has had his interest piqued by the one pupil of the Lycée Gustave Flaubert who can string a sentence together. Each week, Claude (Ernst Umhauer) turns in a piercing anecdote drawn from a classmate's home - handwritten A4 sheets that keep everybody on tenterhooks. Not for the first time chez Ozon, an outsider will be spotted inveigling themselves into bourgeois households. Claude's vivid, gossipy descriptions of the classmate's blokey father and bored mother provide compulsive bedtime reading for Germain and wife Jeanne (Kristin Scott Thomas). Each element starts to comment on every other. Germain ponders whether to intervene when Claude starts to stray in too deep: should he encourage the boy to seduce the mother in the interests of a racier narrative? Or - as a responsible adult - does he caution restraint? What is it we want from stories? Ozon effortlessly swats that canard about writing not making involving cinema, partly through his superb cast, but mostly by inspired composition: in correcting the story's direction, the teacher remembers he can change the course of a life. We, too, become eavesdroppers, hearing Ozon initiate a dialogue with his younger self, and strive to tell an affecting story while critiquing his own wilder impulses. "C'est du Barbara Cartland!" exclaims Germain as one of his protégé"s drafts takes a turn for the florid. One of French cinema's foremost enfants terribles here finally grows up: this elegant and eloquent film weighs its words and images with commendably mature precision.