“Attention, tout va deraper!”
To hear the review
The DVD case for Home suggests that a comparison can be made between Home, on DVD June 30th from Alliance Films, and Hitchcock’s The Birds. There’s a quote from Claude Andre from Ici that suggests the connection. Now, I just watched The Birds, so I was paying close attention for any similarities. I can see it in certain shots, but a quote like that on the box can easily lead you astray. Because this movie is nothing like The Birds. It’s a little more like Jean-Luc Godard’s groundbreaking movie about a traffic jam and a bourgeois apocalypse, Weekend. And not just because both films are in French only, but becaause they both involve traffic, traffic jams, and the seemingly natural loss of sanity that comes with them.
The movie starts out, in true European fashion, with parents playing street hockey with their kids while smokes dangle out of their mouths. It may not be good parenting in the traditional sense, but the family seems terrifically happy. The two kids take baths together - the young boy and his older sister Judith (the sensational Adelaide Leroux) spend the entire second scene naked together, while she (of course) smokes a cigarette in the tub. Leroux spends a lot of this movie naked, but this is a European movie which treats that rather remarkable nudity casually, as though it’s entirely natural, and it doesn’t feel gratuitious or exploitative.
This happy family lives their blissful life in a calm and isolated countryside far from the rest of the world, next to an abandoned highway. It appears that construction on this big highway has been ignored for years, but now it has been finished and the freeway is now open to traffic. Which means that Judith can no longer sunbathe by the road and crank up her heavy metal tunes - she can no longer hear them. The two younger kids have to do a daring dash across the road to the field, and their mom has to throw them their lunch across the freeway. Their dad has to park on the other side, across the road, when he gets home from work, and he crosses to home by means of a drainage tunnel beneath the highway.
Of course it’s a little exaggerated, and a little bonkers. The scenes where Isabelle Huppert is hanging her laundry out by the road, and the bras are drawing honks from passing truckers, are a little much. I guess we are to assume this family is incapable of moving their usual operations to another location, or that this house has no backyard. They eat dinner outside in the front yard by the freeway, wearing earplugs. Of course the noise gets to them, which is understandable. And they’ve had such an idyllic life up until now that the idea of moving isn’t even in their minds. But then again, this isn’t a regular movie with regular characters who behave in regular ways.
I feel that I have been unfair in comparing this movie to Weekend. Truly, there is very little that is similar about the two movies, except for the traffic, the craziness, and the occasional absurdist touch in Home. This movie is far more conventional, and has a pretty standard narrative. But it’s not like The Birds either. It’s not really like anything. It’s just a really good movie about a family that must deal with the impact of the hectic pace of the modern world, which is thrust upon them against their will. The movie is funny and strange, Adelaide Leroux is sexy and strange, and Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Madeleine Budd and Kacey Mottet Klein are all terrific. And strange.
The movie gets stranger and stranger as it goes on, and that’s a good thing - in one scene, the younger sister (now a maniac germophobe) shares a sanitary mask with her older sister, who cuts a hole in it so she can still smoke while she wears it. There are many great scenes in Home, and although it’s in French only, with no English options, this movie is well worth it for anyone who speaks French and is willing to take a chance on something new and daring. And strange.
