Sitcom

A family lives in a large house in the suburbs. Father, mother, daughter and son. One day the father brings home a laboratory rat and puts it in a cage. After that everything in the house begins to change. The son announces that he is gay. The daughter tries to leave and has an accident; she is confined to a wheelchair and her manner hardens. The maid and her husband are drawn into the arrangement as well. The mother resists for a while, then joins in. The father notices nothing and goes on reading his paper. François Ozon writes and directs. Evelyne Dandry and François Marthouret are in the cast. It is Ozon's first feature. The form is black comedy and farce; events accelerate and nothing is explained realistically. Its target is the bourgeois family; the narrative shows how a family keeps its own rules and absorbs everything. The rat is the object at the centre and the film uses it symbolically; what the animal is is never explained. Ozon establishes here the themes he would continue: family, sexuality and the breaking of order. It is short and the pace is fast; the narrative draws out no scene. The ending goes entirely into exaggeration and makes no claim to realism. Who it is for: anyone curious about French black comedy and Ozon's work. Who it is not for: some scenes are provocative, the narrative is coarse, and the characters are deliberately unpleasant.