FROM French writer/director Frances Ozon comes a drama in which serious considerations underpin wickedly and wonderfully clever comedy.

Germain (Fabrice Luchini) teaches literature at Gustav Flaubert High School. His emotional life with waspish wife Jeanne (Kristen Scott Thomas) is neither picnic nor battleground. He knows about the craft of writing but carries the burden of having written a novel that failed to meet his own high standards.

In his class only Claude (Ernst Umhauer) has writing skill. Claude is tutoring classmate Rapha Artole in maths. This may seem altruistic. But Claude, coping with sombre family issues that Ozon conceals until well along the story, more than anything wants to see inside the lower-middle class Artole home. And when he does, the vision of Esther Artole (Emmanuelle Seigner) kicks him squarely in his adolescent hormones. We should not be surprised!

As Germain and Jeanne discuss Claude’s assignments, boy and teacher are on a collision course about the boundaries between reality and imagination. Claude blackmails Germain into an academic fraud that will eventually have severe consequences. In sub-plots, Jeanne has difficulty with falling custom at the art gallery she manages and a Japanese client is taking Rapha’s dad to the financial cleaners.

It’s tasty stuff, taking us to a very satisfying outcome that augurs well for the two characters who most need it. But they’re going to have to earn it.

At Palace Electric and Capitol 6