If you’ve ever picked up one of those organizing-clutter / home-improvement books, you may have noticed a shift in the way advice is dispensed: it’s all about self-help now. There’s nothing necessarily new about the idea that houses and their interiors are exteriorizations of the self, how rooms can be read as expressions of family dynamics. But to guilt you into clearing your coffee table or the landing strip by the door! That’s something new. (It still doesn’t fully explain why the bad guys in Los Angeles noir films always seem to live in Neutra houses though.)
The Swiss-French filmmaker Ursula Meier fashions her debut film, Home, from that central idea: it’s about a family who has lived for the last ten years alongside an unfinished freeway. There’s a lot of gently surreal comic potential in all this, certainly, and Meier doesn’t hesitate: the movie begins with the family playing an impromptu game of hockey on the freeway, and when the father takes out the trash — all the way on the other side of the blacktop, naturally — he walks by a chair and a reading lamp sitting outside. There’s no need to be afraid of thieves since they’re isolated from everyone else, and so — naturally — they sit on a couch and watch television on what passes for their lawn.
The highway is all theirs, but it’s not the grand metaphor for possibility in the Springsteen sense. They’ve simply taken it over as an extension of their living room, clutter included — the result of having lived alone, with no boundaries, for so long. And so when their son — the youngest in their family of five — reports that he’s seen a truck and a construction crew drive down the highway, it’s cause for alarm.
As could be expected, their peaceful household — and Meier does a wonderful job recording their almost idyllic interactions — is thrown into disarray. The mother — bedraggled frump of a housewife one moment, flaming red-haired vision by the side of the road in another (and I partly credit the cinematographer Agnes Godard for this) — is played by Isabelle Huppert. She is determined to stay, however, even as the anonymous and efficient work crews remove their belongings from the freeway and set up metal railings and dividers. (A great scene, with the workmen clad in masks and ominous blood red jumpsuits, with Franz Treichler singing on the soundtrack, “Our house is a house that moves just like the ocean”.)
And it’s all quite droll in the beginning, too, as the family stoically carries on their usual routines even with the din of cars and motorcycles right outside their front door. The eldest daughter, who wears the same bikini for seemingly days on end, gamely sunbathes a few feet away from speeding trucks. Groceries have to be carried across late at night when the traffic has died down. School lunches are lobbed like a softball pitch across a four-lane expressway. They make do anyway.
But not for long. The second daughter begins obsessing over the pollution (though she’s quite right), and starts infecting the youngest son with her hypochondria. The constant rumble of trucks proves to be inescapable and maddening. On a sweltering summer evening, they all move into the room farthest from the road, just so they can sleep. It’s all lighthearted clowning around, like kids at a sleepover, their limbs all tangled, until they realize the absurdity of their condition.
Home is an interesting psychological examination of the ways families cope with stress when their boundaries, both physical and emotional, are crossed. But viewers may be unsatisfied — don’t worry, it’s not really a spoiler — when it devolves rapidly into claustrophobic Repulsion-like territory.
Meier strategically withholds any information about the family — or “the outside world”, for that matter — from the audience, and it’s clearly a way of both positioning the family members as universal types and of keeping the focus solely on the familial unit. The kids go to school, but that all takes place off-screen; the father (played wonderfully by Olivier Gourmet) drives to work every morning, but none of those external affairs matter. The family in Meier’s Home seems to be insulated in their concrete cocoon from the very start, despite having the world literally at their doorstep. This prevents, I think, any easy audience identification — and when the inevitable psychological descent happens in the third act, it’s difficult to reconcile it with the familial bliss of the beginning. This impressive debut is well worth seeing, but it left me somewhat cold.
[Check out Brian Darr's more positive review at Hell on Frisco Bay.]
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