Isabelle Huppert is one of the most decorated of European actresses - over the past thirty years she's won Cannes twice, Venice twice, and got awards from the British, French and European academies. As such, a decent percentage of her films get international distribution of some sort, and the latest of hers to be released in UK cinemas is Home, which debuted in the Critics Week section of the Cannes Film Festival last year.
This is a quirky little film (by debutant director Ursula Meier) following a family who live in a house next to an usused strip of motorway in the middle of nowhere. A care-free family life is depicted with Mom and Dad (Huppert and Gallic everyman Olivier Gourmet) being sufficiently laid back in their approach to parenting the son and two daughters. Communal baths, outdoor tv watching and games of roller-hockey comprise their happy, offbeat existence until out of the blue workers turn up, complete work on the road and after lying unused for a decade the road is opened to the public.
The film has the effect of mirroring its character's lives, it's charming in its unconventionality. Huppert is her usual self, Gourmet stretches himself on occasion, but sadly Adélaïde Leroux (who showed a lot of promise in the otherwise dull Flanders) has little to do other than strut around in a bikini and disrobe every once in a while. Child actors can sometimes be very annoying but Kacey Mottet Klein as the young son keeps himself on the right (i.e. non-punchable) side of cute for the most part. Madeleine Budd is quite amusing as the middle child, distressed at the environmental downsides to having thousands of cars drive past every day.
It's a good thing that there is some humour here and they go for it quite often. This is, and the term is despicable but annoyingly fitting here, a "dramedy", with the tone being light in general but some quite serious stuff going on the longer it goes. The problem is the longer it goes the more the film begins to come to a halt, the further it gets away from its eccentric beginnings the more murky it gets, it's rather reminiscent of Lemming in that respect. It's quite obvious too that it wants to be taken on a metaphorical level, but that would make the whole enterprise much more pretentious and if anything it's probably more rewarding to take the film at face value. So a lot to like, well put together in the main with some fine performances, but it shoots its load a bit too early before limping along to the finish.