Home (2008)

Home is a French film comedy-drama first released in 2008, directed by Ursula Meier.  The film stars Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adélaïde Leroux, Madeleine Budd and Kacey Mottet Klein.  Our overall rating for this film is: very good.


In a quiet stretch of countryside there lies a partially constructed highway.  A few metres from the safety barriers there is an isolated house which is home to a family who have refused to move.  Work on the road is resumed and, once completed, the peace of the area will be lost forever.  How will the family cope with the sudden loss of their country idyll?

One family’s struggle to survive against indomitable odds is the subject of this idiosyncratic debut feature from director Ursula Meier, one-time assistant to Alain Tanner and the author of several short films and documentaries.  Straddling the boundary between realism and surrealism, Home is one of those rare films that tacitly defy categorisation, an odd mélange of psycho-drama and black comedy that is a simultaneously compelling and unsettling portrait of a family in crisis.  Home can be interpreted both as a paean to individualism and an attack on man’s relentless rape of his environment, but what it is really about is how an ordinary family unit copes with an external threat.

Meier has described her film as an inverted road movie.  The characters do not undergo a physical journey, but rather an internal one, although it is nonetheless a road (a busy motorway) which provides the stimulus for the journey.  At the start of the film, we see a model family enjoying an idyllic existence, far from the madding crowd.  It is a picture of paradise, with children happily playing on an abandoned stretch of road whilst the adults live a calm, ordered existence, without a care in the world.  But then, with the shrieking brutality of a wartime invasion, this bucolic harmony is suddenly ripped to shreds and the family’s heaven on Earth becomes the nearest thing to Hell, as the highway beside their house is opened for business.

As the family struggles to acclimatise to the unremitting barrage of noise and pollution that comes their way, it isn’t long before the tensions between the family members, which were just discernible before the motorway opened, swell to epic proportions.   In a brave but doomed attempt to hold the family together, the father (Olivier Gourmet) bricks up all the windows and transforms the house into a wartime bunker, but this merely heightens the intra-family conflict.  The more the family retreats from the world around them, the more they cease to be a cohesive unit, and it is only a matter of time before their self-destructive withdrawal drives them apart for good.  

Despite its somewhat artificial premise, Home is a convincing and perceptive examination of a family struggling to hold itself together against a seemingly insuperable threat, a Swiss Family Robinson for our time.  Ursula Meier’s imaginative screenplay and direction are superbly complemented by Agnès Godard’s evocative cinematography and compelling performances from a talented ensemble cast, headed by Isabelle Huppert.  As the slightly creepy mother who appears perversely impelled to drive her family to destruction, the latter provides not only the focal point for the drama but also a metaphor for our eco conscience, that part of us which (as we happily burn up the kerosene on the fast lane in our gas guzzling four-by-four) sheds a tear for mankind’s unstoppable plunder of the natural world.  Ending on a wry note of optimism, Home offers a glimmer of hope for the future, hope that one day man will tame his penchant for destruction and learn to appreciate the beauty of nature, instead of covering it with tar and cement.  (As if.)

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