Ursula Meier: Home Truths

Home, the feature debut by Swiss-French director Ursula Meier, begins in a bohemian idyll. Marthe (Isabelle Huppert), Michel (Olivier Gourmet) and their three children Judith, Marion and Julien (Adelaide Leroux, Madeleine Budd, Kacey Mottet Klein) live in an isolated house next to a motorway that has remained unopened for over 10 years. The children cycle their bicycles up and down the empty tarmac, Michel plans to finish the swimming pool in the garden and for miles around there is no-one, just empty fields and the peaceful countryside. Until one day when the inevitable happens and the family are brought face to face with an outside world they had tried to escape from.

Home is unusual in the space that it explores. Whilst many films have used the road as a setting for their story, in Home the motorway is a unique space that suddenly intrudes onto this family’s home life. It is a space which feels sterile, soulless and in many ways incompatible with human life due to the constant motion and speed that it exists in. Meier saw the film in many ways as the “inverted image” of a road movie, she says “I had seen houses on the verge of the highway and I told myself it would be interesting to reverse that look.” While most of the film is made up of stationary and hand-held shots at the very end we see the house and family in one fluid, motion shot taken from the very road that has been the focal point of the film. Suddenly, we see the family from a different perspective, in a broader context which hints at wider-reaching themes.

The opening of the motorway not only brings noise and pollution it also brings the family face to face with a world that they had been trying to ignore, that they were desperate to not be a part of. This is a film about people’s relationship to society and the world around them and with several mentions of pollution it would be possible to interpret the film, on one level at least, to being a warning about future climate change. Meier, of Swiss-French descent also sees the film in another way, “[The motorway] is a mirror of the world – violent, aggressive, and polluted – which enters the homes of people who thought they would be able to live alone, set apart from society. In this sense, it is a film about Switzerland.”

As the impact of the road takes a greater hold on the family, the sense of freedom and warmth that is there at the start of the film is gradually replaced with a feeling of claustrophobia as the family tries to shut themselves off from the intrusion. And as the film progresses to its dramatic conclusion, we are unsure just how far Marthe and Michel will go to preserve their former lives. “There is in Home a singular manner of observing … with offbeat black humour, to what point the human being is capable of bearing a situation, of coping with reality, of being able to adapt” Meier says. It is this concept of ‘coping with reality’ that Home really seems to be exploring and specifically what happens when we struggle with that.