You never know what you are going to get from French director François Ozon (Potiche, The Swimming Pool). But you won’t get anything much better than this fluently made and brilliantly acted treatise on teaching, storytelling and the class divide.
The marvellous Fabrice Luchini, who has appeared in many of the best French movies of the past 30 years or so, is a teacher of literature who spies a talented young man in his class when he asks them all to write something about their weekends. Most talk about eating pizza and watching telly but Ernst Umhauer’s student writes eloquently about trying to inveigle his way into a middle-class home through helping a friend with his maths.
As the boy manages to break down the family’s preconceptions, the teacher begins to see his side of the equation. There’s Kristin Scott Thomas as his wife, who runs a second-rate gallery full of awful modern paintings, and Emmanuelle Seigner as the mother of the boy’s friend, both equally good.
It is better not to give away what happens when our young writer falls for Seigner. But suffice to say that the film shows us how, in this beautifully made film, the lives of both teacher and pupil will never be quite the same again.
