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Editorial Reviews
Studio: Kino International Release Date: 07/27/2010
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
a unique and unforgettable visual experience,
By
This review is from: Home (DVD)
****1/2
Have you ever found yourself wondering about those people who live right alongside the freeway - the anonymous folk whose lives we peer into for mere nano-seconds as we hurtle our way past their apartments and houses en route to our destinations? Well, the artists who made "Home" certainly have, and the answer they've come up with makes for a fascinating, one-of-a-kind cinematic experience that, even more than most movies, has to be seen to be fully appreciated. The family in "Home" leads a relatively carefree and decidedly unconventional lifestyle. Their house stands adjacent to an abandoned freeway, which they use as their own private recreation area. They also view bath time as a communal experience (this being Switzerland and all). All is going reasonably well (despite some mild familial tension here and there), until one day and without any warning, the roadway is reopened to traffic, shattering the family's once-peaceful existence with the sounds of whooshing cars and honking horns, the penetrating odor of exhaust fumes and fossil fuels, a diminution of privacy (especially during traffic jams), and a nonstop assault on the senses. Even getting to the other side of the road - to school or to work - becomes a daily, death-defying game of chicken with speeding vehicles whose drivers have no intention of slowing down for bothersome and unwelcome pedestrians. This tremendously odd little film is obviously intended as a parable about the oppressiveness and chaos of modern life as it encroaches ever more forcefully onto the peace and tranquility of a rural existence. The family members become increasingly ill-tempered, paranoid, neurotic, even violent as the outside world inexorably presses its way into their once-placid lives. But far more than the characters and themes, it is the astonishing mise-en-scene that ultimately works its way into the viewer's psyche and that makes it hard not only to avert one's eyes during the course of the movie but to get back to one's own "reality" once it's over. Director Ursula Meier's work here is reminiscent of Luis Bunuel in one of his less playful moods, as she focuses on a group of everyday people trapped in a surrealistic nightmare from which they are unable to awaken. It is definitely a case in which the scene becomes an integral reflection of the psychological states of the characters. Isabelle Hupert and Olivier Gourmet play the parents; Madeleine Budd and Kacey Mottet Klein their two children; and Adelaide Leroux, Gourmet's nubile daughter from a previous marriage who spends most of her time sunbathing for the highly appreciative motorists and truckers who keep whizzing on by. Unique and unforgettable.
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Life on the edge - at once a fascinating story of a family and a fable depicting the breakdown of an ideal,
This review is from: Home (DVD)
A family's isolated idyllic existence along the edge of an abandoned highway is interrupted when it is unexpectedly opened for traffic. Ursula Meier, in a potent directorial debut, depicts from the outset and directly without any need for explanation the effortless and carefree life of a family whose relative isolation enables them to live as they will, to escape from the expectations and judgments of others and live simply. We are gradually made aware that their stability as a family depends upon this separation from the outside world. This is especially true of the mother, played fearlessly by Isabelle Huppert, whose ability to manage the home and to cope with her situation begins to break down as the world intrudes. There are hints that this is not the first time, and that they had come to this place in hopes of achieving some kind of stability.
The cinematography is rich, the performances uniformly strong, the story manages to work both as drama and as allegory. I loved the soundtrack, and Nina Simone over the credits was a perfect ending. I just finished seeing it the second time and it managed to both fascinate and frighten. At some level this is, effectively, a highly restrained ecological horror film, where the monster is just the world encroaching in, in the form of increasing traffic and incessant noise and pollution, and that triggers desperation. In many ways the film reminded me of a more subtle and smaller scale version of something like The Mosquito Coast, and it works with the same issues: the idea of the need to escape into a carefree wilderness, the idea that a man should somehow protect his family at all costs from the risks of the outside world. On the one hand, the drama that accompanies the gradual breakdown of their comfortable rituals is fascinating to watch. Hints that the highway will be opening are met at first with disbelief, then curiosity and eventually despair. On the other hand, as it develops there is a clear sense that something more is at stake here than the merely personal lives of this family. There are hints of something more than just a realistic story of familial breakdown, and I couldn't help but think of Ballard's Concrete Island and of Buñuel's The Discreet Charm Of The Bourgeoisie, or even the much darker, Dogtooth. After all the life they manage to lead is a kind of bourgeois fantasy - with a rugged male father figure who goes off into the unknown every day in order to bring back the supplies that will sustain his family, and of the beautiful wife who is keeper of the home, who greets each child as they come home from school with a ready-made snack, of the carefree innocence with which siblings bathe together nude - it is this fantasy they have managed to achieve apart, that inevitably won't last, but it's fascinating how far they are willing to go in an effort to maintain it. The final shot, that depicts what is left of their efforts, from the perspective of an intrigued traveler on the highway, manages to say a great deal about general carelessness regarding the impact of the endless suburbanization of everyday life. From the perspective of "progress" it's a good thing that everyone is connected and nobody can ever be away from the gaze of their neighbors. I'm not so sure that's a good thing, but as the film makes clear it's not an easy thing to escape.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Rather dumb,
By
This review is from: Home (DVD)
There is some sort of moral tale at the heart here about a weird, but happy, family living absurdly close to the end of a rural highway in France. Suddenly, the road is extended and reopened, and the family is surrounded by a mounting number of noisy speeding vehicles. The commentary is about man's destruction of natural beauty and quiet, I suppose. The radio reports of the freeway's opening are funny as the announcer absurdly extols the virtues of the new highway. The teenage daughter appears to do nothing but lay around and suntan all day while listening to heavy metal music. What the father does for a living is hard to say. The mother seems to be a bit bonkers and cannot bear the idea of ever leaving their rather squalid house, filled with dirty clutter. I half expected someone to get run over by a speeding car any minute. You won't come away with much from this little film.
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