Home (2008, Dir. Ursula Meier)

Last year saw the release of Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours, an elegiac film which dealt with three grown-up children picking over their deceased mother’s estate, a beautiful country house containing an extensive art collection which once belonged to her uncle. A sense of sadness pervaded the film as it dwelt on a modern society that all too often places financial value over sentimental value; and in which family ties are disrupted as siblings move abroad to work in countries as far-flung as China and America. Nevertheless, one left the cinema with a real sense not just of the fragility of the family unit, but also of its importance: the time spent together results in shared memories with which we can imbue a house in which we have lived with a lasting emotional worth we can carry away with us.

On the face of it, Home is in complete contrast to Summer Hours – it deals with a family who make a stand against modernisation and refuse to leave their house, leading to a Pyrrhic struggle – but it falls short of providing an equivalent contemplative message.

Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) and Ricky Ponting look-alike Michel (Olivier Gourmet) live with their three children in serene rural isolation next to an abandoned road. Their existence is an eccentric, but happy, one; and Meier shows a deft touch when developing an opening half-hour of real warmth and humour. However, the road is then re-opened (and given its own radio station), which will spoil everything – not just for the family, but also for the audience. For no matter the perpetual stream of traffic rumbling past her front door, chugging out exhaust fumes; no matter that to get to work or to school involves a perilous slalom between speeding cars; no matter that her youngest son is wetting the bed, or that one of her daughters has run away and the other has taken to eating grass – Marthe will not leave.

Why won’t she leave? Perhaps it is because this film is a heavy-handed metaphor that can only follow the narrow ‘one-way’ path defined by its own restrictive premise. Perhaps we are meant to infer that Marthe has previously suffered some form of mental breakdown, and that this has left her incapable of dealing with change in a fast-paced world. Or perhaps Marthe is simply incredibly annoying. (Certainly, one imagines that Marthe, portrayed by an actress less skilled than the formidable Huppert, would be a completely unsympathetic character.)

As the family begin the process of bricking themselves up inside their house, one thing is for sure: their obduracy is not inspiring, but irritating. At the end of Summer Hours, the three siblings disperse; at the end of Home, the family seal themselves off from the outside world. The former is poignant but uplifting; the latter only serves to remind us that stupidity can be destructive.