On DVD: Isabelle Huppert Tests the Limits in Harrowing Home
Nobody makes movies about crazy families like the French, and Ursula Meier's Home (2008) is a fresh, mysterious entry in the Post-Modern Family Blues derby, hyperreal to the touch but keeping symbolic secrets. It's officially a Swiss movie, but I think only because Meier, who's French, could only find her remarkable location in Switzerland: a lonely, nondescript brick house sitting on the shoulder of a huge expanse of decommissioned highway. The layout, house and road both, are so stark and odd they're like found objects out of a Surrealist painting.
We meet this clan of five as they enjoy a rollicking, late-night game of street hockey right on the empty highway: Mom (Isabelle Huppert) sharing butts with her oldest, surliest daughter Judith (Adelaide Leroux) as Dad (Olivier Gourmet), teenage Marion (Madeleine Budd) and prepubescent Julien (Kacey Mottet Klein) dashing about a little too enthusiastically. It's one of those families, in movies and in real-life, that stands a little too close, shouts a little too loudly, bathes together, dresses inappropriately, and sometimes doesn't dress quite enough.
We don't get a full bead on the family, on what makes them click, until halfway through when one of the daughters simply says, "Mom only feels well here." Ah. Every wacky eccentricity, natural or playacted, falls into place for us, just as pressure is brought to bear on the family in the form of highway workers, repaving and nonstop traffic. Suddenly, home is a detached zoo cage at the mercy of a million cars; they cannot even leave without crossing the multi-lanes on foot, or crawling under the road through a drainage tunnel. The noise and privacy loss are crises, but the fear of pollution becomes the family's undoing, especially after Mom forces Julien into some midnight rollerskating on the highway and incites the desperate Dad to get them all to finally leave. Mom refuses to budge, and then the domestic queasiness really sets in.
It's a simple, insidiously logical scenario, but one where you can smell the fumes of Michael Haneke, J.G. Ballard and Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend -- which is to say, subtext rules. (Everything that happens is a mad extreme version of what we mean by "family" and "home.") We never leave that one location; "reality" only intervenes via local radio news, declaring the new highway a public-planning triumph. Meier, directing her first feature, gets the family vibe down pat. Having Huppert leading the charge with your peculiar, metaphor-heavy French-Swiss family thriller is always an advantage; here as always, she is fierce, terrifyingly unpredictable and absolutely convincing.
Gourmet, an overbearing, balding lug discovered by the Dardennes brothers, doesn't overdo the beleaguered-husband angst; he's in this mess til the bitter end, and never shows signs of surrender. But it's Klein's Julien, the little towheaded sprite in the center, that may be Home's linchpin, both a complete wild card (he's almost feral, though he does go to school) and an innocent lost in the modern wilderness.