The Ozon Lair: In Praise of François Ozon

The title of François Ozon’s In the House is likely to tantalise those familiar with the man's back catalogue. From his first feature, 1998’s Sitcom, in which a suburban household is terrorised by a pet rat, to his 2010 effort Potiche, a satirical Catherine Deneuve vehicle about a housewife freed from maternal obligation, the French director consistently insinuates how menacing and threatening a domicile can be.

Various influences are channeled through the filmmaker’s obsession with familial spaces. Sitcom is indebted to Pasolini’s Teorema, a classic account of bourgeois values breaking down as a lusty stranger sleeps with the occupants of a single Italian home. By replacing the stranger with a rodent, the effect Ozon creates is more magical realist and tongue-in-cheek than his source material, but his commentary on middle class hypocrisy is unmistakable. The auteur also notably adapted the socialist critique of R.W. Fassbinder's play Water Drops on Burning Rocks, about a businessman's inexplicable domination of all who enter his apartment.

While a student at Paris' prestigious La Fémis film school, Ozon was looked down upon for watching Hollywood movies alongside more respectful Euro-arthouse fare. Exposure to divergent styles goes some way to explaining the eclectic nature of his output. The type of creepy house found in horror staples such as Psycho, The Haunting, and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre was surely on the director’s mind when making his Criminal Lovers, in which an ogre locks a young couple up in his basement, and Swimming Pool, a meta-murder mystery featuring Charlotte Rampling as an author intoxicated by the eeriness of a French villa.

Perhaps because of his close acquaintance with American pulp, Ozon’s fixation with familial life is finally identifiable as a study of sexism, the sort concentrated in mainstream cinema. ‘Women’s director’ Douglas Sirk is another major reference point. Musical 8 Femmes, which first made Ozon famous outside France, and Potiche, are steeped in Sirkian melodramatic irony. Set in the 50s and 70s respectively, they are bold in both colour and their appraisal of patriarchy.

With its salutatory heading, In the House is bound not to disappoint in terms of seedy sexuality, Hollywood-esque pastiche, and social exposition, all of which will presumably be focused on an outwardly civilised but deeply disturbed human home.