PIFF 2010 Installment II
14 February 2010
Home
dir. Ursula Meier
Switzerland
Home may not a good film to see with your baby on Valentine’s Day. For this one it’s just as well I’m a troubled loner.
I was drawn not so much by the premise as by the presence of Isabelle Huppert in the cast. She is among our finest actors, with a long and distinguished list of credits, among them Entre Nous (dir. Diane Kurys), Amateur (dir. Hal Hartley), and La Pianiste (The Piano Teacher, dir. Michael Haneke). She has never let me down.
Huppert is Marthe, who with her husband, Michel, and their three children enjoys a bizarrely idyllic existence in a house on the edge of an unfinished highway surrounded by empty fields. Each morning Michel drives off along a dirt road through the fields to whatever his employment is. Judith, the older of two teenage daughters, spends her days sunbathing, chain-smoking, and listening to music with the volume cranked up to ear-piercing levels, while Marion and Julien walk off through the fields to catch the bus to school. In the evening they all play hockey on roller blades on the highway.
One day out of nowhere road crews appear and next thing anyone knows the highway is completed and open and traffic whizzing by all hours of day and night, disrupting their lives and wreaking havoc on their psyches.
Michel, Marion, and Julien must climb over the newly installed guardrails and sprint across the highway during breaks in the traffic to go off to work and school. Judith is a distraction to male drivers as she suns herself in her bikini. Marthe struggles to hang out the laundry in the virtual maelstrom created by the constant stream of trucks and cars just a few meters away. The noise is incessant and intolerable.
Michel gets cranky. Marthe is a little left of normal to begin with, even by this family’s standards and even before the highway. She would unable to cope anywhere else, so moving is out of the question. Now she shows signs of cracking.
Marion, the studious counterpart to her sunbathing sister, tracks the number of autos passing by and is convinced the pollution will kill them all. She tells her brother they won’t make it through the summer as she checks his back for lead-poisoning spots.
A highway accident that causes traffic to be stopped in both directions, with men getting out of their cars to gawk at the sunbathing Judith, calls to mind the magnificent traffic jam in Godard’s Week End. It might not be too much of a reach to read Home as a 21st century update of Godard’s 1967 skewering of bourgeois values that ends in its own dark vision of rock and roll, revolution, and cannibalism in the woods outside Paris.
What begins as a quirky, farcical depiction of a family living as much as possible on its own terms in the modern world becomes a dark testament to the impossibility of that vision as they literally wall themselves off from the highway. The film becomes almost static, and a sustained, weird tension is created. Where in the world can Meier possibly be going with this?
This is a strong film, not always a pleasure to watch, somewhat like La Pianiste in that regard, though nowhere near as excruciating. Huppert is superb as a woman quietly at the end of her tether. Finally, awaking from her first sleep in weeks, she takes a sledgehammer to the cinder blocks and mortar construction put up around the house to shut out the noise of the highway and leads her family off through the fields, together except for Judith who at some point disappeared, evidently taking up with some guy who spotted her sunbathing. But where are they going? Where is there for them to go?
15 February 2010
The Good, the Bad, the Weird
dir. Kim Ji-woon
South Korea
A bounty hunter, an arrogant and dandyish, stone-cold killer, a zany thief, several bandit gangs, and the Japanese army race to find buried Qing dynasty treasure in 1930s Manchuria in this Korean homage to Clint Eastwood and Sergio Leone. Need I say more?
David :: Feb.15.2010 :: House Red: Film :: No Comments »