Home - Casa dolce casa?

Home is a very strange movie. It is a family with two teenage daughters and one young son living in the middle of a huge golden field of grass. A freeway opens right by the house. It gets noisier. The drivers leer. The drivers honk. The noise becomes non-stop. There is a traffic jam and people get out of their cars and stare. The family cannot deal with this and slowly go mad, cementing up the windows. The little boy is the only sane one in the movie. He handles all this as just so much adventure. One daughter is the sort you love to hate, full of herself, selfish, totally absorbed with her appearance, idle, rude. The other is just plain crazy. Mom and Dad are a very loving caring patient couple. It is a movie where the circumstances gradually deteriorate. I think of Roman Polanski's Repulsion for a similar effect. It is like a horror movie -- unpleasantness for the sake of unpleasantness. There are no murders or zombies, just frayed people who cannot cope with the situation. There is quite a bit of nudity, but I just put that down to a difference in the way the French view nudity within the family. It is not sexual. The ending made no sense to me. It just ended things in mid air without any sort of resolution. The whole movie left me queasy, and wondering if perhaps it were some great metaphor than went right over my head.

Kacey Mottet Klein who plays the little boy Julien is an amazing actor. Not once did I notice he was acting. He was completely believable. In one scene he begged his Mom to let him out of being locked in the bathroom. It was heart-melting. I could not stand that frail little character entombed with the rest of that wacko family.

Home, the directorial debut from young French-Swiss hopeful Ursula Meier, is a film about communal captivity, the disenfranchisement of an archetypal family unit and, in many ways, it's the 'road movie' of directionless modernity.

This César nominated drama follows a dysfunctional family who live beside an abandoned motorway, somewhere in-between two French cities. Although the house is an uninspired concrete block, their surrounding landscape is rather bucolic in stature, with the kids using the roadway as a garden to sunbathe, take a dip in the blow-up pool, or play street hockey across it's straight, uninspired grey surface. Although we never get the conclusive hows and whys of their unconventional living situation, it's implied that it was a decision of desperation on behalf of the agoraphobic, stay-at-home mother Marthe (the enchanting Isabelle Huppert). When her doting husband Michel (Olivier Gourmet) returns home from work one evening to break the news that the road project is going to reconvene, he is in distress and determined that the family should leave immediately. Marthe is less intimidated, resolute on staying in the unlikely place she has made into an idyllic family home. With cars soon filling the motorway day and night, the risk of pollution causes friction to emanate from within the family, and soon their paradise retreat turns into a tarmacked prison.

Devised by a four piece writing team, including Meier and fellow upcoming European auteur Olivier Lorelle (Days of Glory), it's perhaps no wonder how every character in the family is fleshed out. All play an integral role in the group dynamic, how it will soon be tested and, to an extent, shattered. The suffocating mother Marthe who is afraid she'll lose her family to the outside world, the stoic rock father Michel, the typically angsty eldest daughter, the indifferent and paranoid middle child Marion (Madeleine Budd), and, most sympathetically, the young, curious and adventure seeking son Julien (Kacey Mottet Klein). The cast are all pulling their weight here, particularly Haneke's muse Huppert, in an atypically austere maternal role, matched with Dardenne Brothers' regular Olivier Gourmet as a compassionate father reaching the end of his tether.

As the family's proximate relationship intensifies, the eco-parable is verified, and the drone of cars whizzing past their kitchen window becomes unbearable, Meier resorts to feverish melodrama, with a life-threatening consequence. Cinematographer Agnès Godard manages to make the transition from warm open landscape to claustrophobic crazy pretty aimlessly, but the drastic shift in narrative tone removes any sympathy we once had for the barmy quintet, replacing it with utmost frustration. Why can't they leave? What's so special about the house? Not only implausible, the stir-crazy psychological torment in Home's witching hour ends up compromising what would otherwise be an astoundingly accomplished feature debut.

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I recently saw this at the 2010 Palm Springs International Film Festival where writer/director Ursula Meier was on hand at my screening for an audience Q&A following the film. Meier explained that she got the idea for the film by seeing a house near a busy highway and letting her imagination run away with what kind of people would live there and the effect of being so close to a highway on them. I think we have all wondered about the inhabitants of homes we've seen while riding in a train or car and seeing homes without freeway barrier walls exposed to the noise of the traffic. In this story a family of five live in home where a major highway has been built running through their front yard. this major thoroughfare was never completely finished or opened to use so it has sat unused for years. The family uses the pavement for their personal use and has all their lawn furniture, etc. on it. One day the family learns the highway will be finished and opened at last and the result has a dramatic effect on their lives. They have lived there for 10 years. The mother has a fear of going out in public, the father is claustrophobic, the oldest daughter wants to escape from her boring existence at the isolated house, the youngest daughter is a mathematics and statistics whiz with an accelerated phobia for toxins and the boy is a pretty normal kid who likes hanging out with his friends. This is a strange and quirky film and pretty good as a debut feature for Meier. It was Switzerland's official submission to the 82nd academy awards for Best foreign Language Film. Some very good films come out of Switzerland but I don't think this warrants a BFLF submission. This may too slow and strange for many so I can't recommend it to a general audience but it's different and I would give it a 6.5 out of 10.

The World Health Organisation reckons regular night-time noise of more than 45dB can ruin your health. Here's a film that treats a fact of modern life and turns into a "home under attack" movie. It's coming, and you can't stop it.... It's quite clever to have a home-invasion movie where the alien force is nothing more scary than noise and loss of privacy.

Swiss writer-director Ursula Meier backs this tale of modern times with jazz tracks, classical work, and Nina Simone. The music is a diversion from the relentless pressure building on the family as they face up to life next to a Trans-European highway.

Cinematographer Agnès Godard captures the images brilliantly, from the pose Michel strikes on his car roof with the chest freezer that now has to be delivered across the new road, to the line of holiday traffic stretching into the distance in one long bidirectional jam.

Very interesting and surprising film starring one of my favorite actress, Isabelle Huppert. The film describes the changes that take place into an ordinary family who lives next to a highway.One day the highway is opened, and still life turns into a nightmare.Each member of the family deals with the problem in a different way. All of them try to keep on doing the same things in their own way, but things go wronger day by day.The cast play such excellent roles that you can feel the anxiety as they do.I was asking myself during the film Why don't they leave ? But there are no answers, only questions. Enjoy the film and try to find why.