Whether it is used as a metaphor for society or as a basis to analyse human relationships, the family is one of the main themes in literature, theatre and cinema. The release in France on October 29 of Home by Ursula Meier -the film premiered at Cannes Film Festival this year at International Critics’ Week and has just been screened at London Film Festival last week- is a chance to look back on the family and its relationship with the rest of the world.
A family lives in an isolated house by the side of a highway that was never finished and never opened. They’re all different -each one at his place-, they form an harmonious whole, a family. When the highway his announced to open soon, their world falls apart. It was a playground yesterday, the road his now a dangerous area. Then the noise starts to fill up the space, until it fills it all. Slowly, like an insidious evil, the exterior world begins to interfere with the harmony of the family life. The response to this otherness that was kept away so far will be collective, familial, but also individual. And while it disrupts the relationship of the family to the rest of the world, it will also change the family microcosm.
The confrontation of a family with an external element that changes the familial order was also the theme of Pasolini’s Theorem and its Japanese trash version, Visitor Q by Takashi Miike, the external element in these movies being a character that reveals to the members of the family a part of their personality ignored so far. It was also a little white mouse that made the family depicted by French director François Ozon in his first film Sitcom explode. Behind those films, like in Home by Ursula Meier, stands the idea that the family exists as an entity as long as everyone of its members plays his part. Modifying people in the family cell weakens -and may even destroy- the balance that keeps the family as a whole. The external elements act as catalysts for the characters neurosis, and while revealing to themselves an asleep part of their personalities, they change their relationship to the family entity. It’s also as a unit that the family incarnated a whole social class in films like The Damned by Luchino Visconti or The Garden of the Finzi-Continis by Vittorio De Sica. By representing a social microcosm by itself, the family enables the illustration of its nuances through the family members. It finally is the common point of all the films: family is a structured micro-society and it can only rely to the rest of the world through conflict. This idea was of course explicitly used in mafia flicks in films like The Godfather by Francis Ford Coppola or Goodfellas by Martin Scorsese. The family, whether real or symbolic, has its own order, its own laws and rules, and its confrontation with the rest of society can only be a struggle.
Home is a film about a happy family, a family that has found a balance –between its members and in its relationship with the rest of the world, which was carefully kept away. The opening of the sleeping highway will act as a developer of all the problems that were muted so far. And if its effect will brand the characters, no doubt the family will eventually grow stronger. French-Swiss director Ursula Meier, who writes and directs here her first 35 mm feature film, offers a rich vision of the family unit and a powerful work, a true declaration of faith in the power of cinema and its ways of expression, through the work on the frame, the editing, the cinematography, the sound. An author you should definitely keep an eye on.
Francis Chérasse
HOME by Ursula Meier - 2008 - Switzerland, France, Belgium - Written by Ursula Meier, Antoine Jaccoud, Raphaëlle Valbrune, Gilles Taurand - Cast: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adélaïde Leroux.
Watch out next week our interview with Ursula Meier!
In the meantime, check out the French trailer:
Very occasionally, there are films that give the impression of having found an exact equivalence between their subject and their form, thus attaining a state of “grace”. It may seem strange to apply this word to A côté (Next Door), which is set in a hostel for families visiting a relative in the Rennes penitentiary. And yet Stéphane Mercurio’s documentary performs this miracle. By filming for almost a year the wives, mothers and less often, the fathers, who stopover in this halfway house between the outside and the visiting room, she confronts us with the violence and arbitrary nature of the prison system. We see a woman who discovers her son has been transferred to Brest and she will have to take the train when she has four other children and little money. We see parents who are told their child is not there and who visit every hospital in town, finding him, without being able to see him following a transfer for attempted suicide. We see a series of major and minor annoyances: a visit cancelled because the machine that distributes tickets is not working or a book that couldn’t be given. As a counterpoint to this sober and poignant documentary are magnificent photographs by Grégoire Korsakow - the only references to the outside world - that capture the main characters in court, at home or by the sea. These intimate images are another way of describing the loneliness and waiting as time stands still.
For the last few weeks posters all over Paris (curiously absent from the neighbourhood itself) announced the opening on Saturday, 11 October of the 104 (or CENTQUATRE). For the uninitiated, it seemed mysterious, but it was not for the many who had been waiting for the day ever since the Paris Town Hall decided to convert this space, located in the far reaches of the 20th arrondissement, from the Municipal Funeral Service (until 1997) into an ambitious cultural flagship. After two and a half years of work to the tune of 100 million Euros, the public was finally able to discover the new multidisciplinary artistic facilities during Open Day. Ironically, the doors did have to be shut due to crowds. 
“It’s been interesting to watch Vertigo rise up to number one from number twenty in the annual polls. That one really haunts me. I like the way it’s driven orchestrally, it’s almost like a baby Wagner opera, a very simple story but a very timeless one, and it seems to move as the logic of music, and I like the way it’s shot, in a very leisurely fashion. When Jimmy Stewart is driving around in San Francisco, he seems to have a whole string section on the backseats of his car, upon and down the Frisco hills, big decadent romantic strings very hypnotic and it feels like you just know, like everybody know, where the movie’s going, and you just have to go there anyway, no matter how awful it is.” 
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“It’s a shock. After I saw the movie I found out that it is the director’s only film, and for me it is a masterpiece. I saw it when I was 24, I went into the theatre because of the pictures -that usually repulse me-, I saw the beautiful black and white, I saw the frame. I came in, I saw the film, and it was a real physical experience -a total experience. I remember sounds, I remember precise shots, scenes, dialogues, I remember many elements. I never saw those two actors again but she is fantastic and he is already announcing Scorsese’s De Niro. And what a way to treat those serial killers: with such humanity! It’s a couple, a great love story, and their crimes come from their fusion, when she can no longer stand it to see him doing the gigolo for old ladies. They start then to poison them and travel through the States. It’s also a wandering in the United States of the Sixties, with a Bonnie and Clyde touch, a wandering magnified by the film, by drama. There is a fake drowning sequence, which is for me one of the greatest scenes in film history. And that fantastic ending, with them sending letters from a prison to another, waiting for their execution, with her going to death with joy, thinking she will join her lover for eternity. We can feel all her frustrations, her hate of her own body, the way she turns into a monster. Everything is there, everything is said about humanity.”
At first, we wonder what’s got into 24 year old Antonio Campos, director (as well as scriptwriter and editor) of this brilliant first film with its images of video gags and trashy porn bathed in the darkness of Scope, quirky framing, still shots of feet, etc. This focus on the formal, that looks at first like youthful folly, soon gains in substance. These images that seem “badly made” paradoxically reveal the presence of a real filmmaker. The question is who is he and why is he filming.