Home (2008)
Directed by Ursula Meier

Film Review

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.

Film Synopsis

Marthe, Michel and their three children have been living in perfect harmony for ten years.  Their house is in the most peaceful spot, miles from anywhere beside a stretch of motorway that was never completed.  Then, one day, without warning, work on the road suddenly resumes.  The noise is deafening, the pollution unbearable, but Marthe and her family are absolutely adamant that they will not move.  Even when the road is completed and cars come whizzing past their homestead at the rate of a hundred a minute the family's resolution to stay put remains intact.  Adapting to these changed circumstances is proving to be a challenge, but whilst they may have lost their little corner of paradise Marthe and her family have no intention of being driven from the house that has become their home...