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Home
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| Year: |
2008
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Director: |
Ursula Meier
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| Stars: |
Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adélaïde Leroux, Madeleine Budd, Kacey Mottet Klein
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| Genre: |
Drama, Weirdo |
| Rating: |
  7 (from 1 vote) |
| Review: |
This family of five have lived in this isolated country home for about a decade now, and it suits their lifestyle, and more importantly the mother Marthe (Isabelle Huppert), who is suffering from some kind of phobia. Although it may be in the middle of nowhere, the two youngest children are still sent to school, and the father Michel (Olivier Gourmet) does go to work, while the eldest daugter Judith (Adélaïde Leroux) lies out in the yard all day and sunbathes while listening to hard rock and Marthe busies herself with housework. But there is an unfinished highway next to their home, having lain uncompleted for years - until now.
Director Ursula Meier had been making short films for over a decade before she settled on Home as her first feature, and became a rare Swiss film to gain international attention, though not so much that it would give blockbusters cause for concern. It was one of those works which may not exhibit any fantastical elements, although the ending is a little vague on that point and could be taken in one of two ways, yet felt as if it could have fitted into the science fiction category purely for its off-kilter take on the modern world and its solutions for coping with it. It was an inscrutable effort, but by the close you could see what Meier was getting at.
In fact, what Home was most reminiscent of was a J.G. Ballard story, one of his tales of urban living gone hopelessly awry as the family in question undergo some radical changes to their lifestyle even as they fight to preserve it just as they have been experiencing it. As with Ballard, finding a way to prevail against cold modernity can be transcendent in itself, and there's no sense of tragedy here, more a curious gaze at some strange behaviour that we nevertheless understand as a reaction to their circumstances. Not that they were an entirely happy family to begin with, with middle child Marion (Madeleine Budd) clever but obviously not coping too well with growing up, and Marthe never going more than twenty feet away from the front door.
But they didn't know when they had it good, because the disruption is heralded by the radio station that Marthe likes to listen to going off the air, replaced by static, and eventually the only listening she can receive is the motorway broadcast, which singlemindedly celebrates the vehicles that are now passing by their window. Now the road is too hazardous to cross, and the children are having diffculty getting to school, Michel can't park his car near the house, and Judith is being beeped at by passing lechers as she tries to continue with her extensive sunworshipping routine. Add to all that the constant noise, never mind the danger - son Julien (Kacey Mottet Klein) has to stop seeing his friends - and the family are headed for breakdown.
Fortunately this does not mean a load of twitchy acting as this is more subtle, though it does get across a message that you are damned of you do, damned if you don't as far as interacting with the outside world is concerned. No matter where you think you have found your place to settle, the society you live in will find a way to interrupt or disturb you, and if you cut yourself off completely, then you're on a path to self-destruction. This is a bleak little film, and as the family work out a way to stop the influence of the traffic upsetting their peace and quiet, from plugging their ears to stocking up the freezer and bricking up the windows and doors, you can see that their endeavours to preserve some kind of stability has sent them all round the bend. The characters outside of this unit are almost incidental, because the looming, faceless monolith of the rest of the planet's population is the real menace as nowhere is there any compromise to be found.
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| Reviewer: |
Graeme Clark
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