IT’S ALWAYS cheering to encounter a film that defies easy classification, and Ursula Meier’s debut feature is just such a beast. Beginning as a sleepy slice of dirty naturalism, the picture then takes on the quality of an absurdist joke, before descending to much darker places. Thank heavens the potent Isabelle Huppert is on hand to lead us through the mayhem. Few other actors would be eccentric enough to make it fly.
The opening act offers us happy scenes from a rural, scruffy idyll. Huppert and her bluff husband (Olivier Gourmet) live in rolling fields by the side of an apparently disused road. They play hockey in the street. They share baths. One grumpy daughter listens to death metal while her tolerant dad blasts hot jazz from the car stereo.
Life changes suddenly and brutally when the trucks move in to transform their quiet thoroughfare into a busy, noisy dual carriageway. Making fine use of the perennially imaginative Agnès Godard's fluid camera, Meier manages to turn an apparently familiar scene – cars surging down a freeway – into something pointedly surreal. When the vehicles move, a strip of harsh modernity imposes itself on this sprawling nowhere; when they halt we are reminded of the scary traffic jam in Jean-Luc Godard's Weekend.
At first, the family regard the intrusion as an opportunity to exercise their powers of invention: they throw pack- lunches across the road and make use of hitherto ignored tunnels. But, as events progress, the noise and bustle begin to drive them crazy and – more reminders of Weekend– they succumb to various psychoses.
Think too hard about Homeand it might start to annoy you. It is just possible that something rather bland is being said about the horrors of (groan) bourgeois conformity. However, approach the picture as a multi-tonal exercise in the cinema of the absurd and it should do some very intriguing things to your frontal lobes. Recommended.
Directed by Ursula Meier. Starring Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adélaide Leroux, Madeleine Budd, Kacey Mottet Klein PG cert, Screen, Dublin, 98 min
