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This Film On

Home

Did you ever wonder about those houses situated directly adjacent to a freeway, who lives in them, and how they can stand the rattle and hum? So did Ursula Meier. Living on the road takes on a new meaning in Home, Meier's impressive debut feature. The director has referred to her film as "a reverse road movie," but one could also say it's something close to a photo negative of The Shining: a family cracking up and facing mortal danger not in eerie quiet and isolation but at the prospect of losing them.

At first, the family in Home is deliriously happy. They've adapted to rural isolation and apparently sought it out for a reason that's more implied than spelled out. Fragile mother Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) needs her quiet, but ten years of empty threats to open a highway route directly in front of the family home have finally come home to roost. Till now, the family has enjoyed the blacktop as an extension of their front lawn, a place for street hockey and sunning. The news that the road will be finished and opened deeply unsettles father Michel (Olivier Gourmet), but Marthe has no intention of moving. The family has invested in this place, which has provided a necessary if delicate balance for Marthe's psyche and therefore the family unit. When the highway thunders into operation, boy Julien (Kacey Mottet Klein), teen Marion (Madeleine Budd) and young adult Judith (Adélaïde Leroux) feel the effects. One becomes a distressing hypochondriac, one secretly hatches escape plans, and the other responds poorly to the emotional claustrophobia of the family under pressure.

The father, for his part, is literally claustrophobic, but he overcomes his fear for what he believes to be a greater value: sealing off the home (with cinder blocks) to keep out incessant noise pollution. Though Meier and co-screenwriters Antoine Jaccoud & Raphaëlle Valbrune with Gilles Taurand & Olivier Lorelle wisely resist a heavy hand, the metaphors are clear enough. This is a family threatened by society, and when they can no longer avoid it, quiet desperation rapidly becomes suffocation. Meier skillfully taunts us by stepping to the brink of melodrama as the family shows signs of homicidal and suicidal tendencies, but there's a keen sense of absurdism (and in Agnès Godard's brilliant photography a sort of surrealist realism, if there is such a thing) in the circumstances. Meier makes choices that work cumulatively: the slightly creepy neediness in the way the family members reach out and touch one another, the way the summer peels away the family's clothing so they seem so often bare (in at least one case defiantly), the apparent lack of family boundaries that at first seems appealing but eventually facilitates crazy-making.

The acting is superb: not surprisingly in the case of bona fide stars Gourmet and Huppert (the queen of internalized suffering bubbling to the surface), but certainly impressive in the younger actors, who sell the totally convincing family interactions so important to the film's success. Because Home is a French film (actually a Switzerland/France/Belgium co-production), it's also allowed to have a fascinating rhythm, clinched in the resolving use of Nina Simone's "Wild Is the Wind." Home is a darkly funny, haunting, and perhaps hopeful exploration of what happens when our maddeningly fast-moving world comes mockingly close to those paralyzed by life.