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OPENING NIGHT FILM

“Home is the place where things can go wrong.” Even though other names come to mind when watching this faultless first feature film, like Friedkin or Tati for instance, Franco-Swiss director Ursula Meier would probably subscribe wholeheartedly to this famous quote by David Lynch. Here, family bliss seems even more radiant because it results from a wondrous victory over reality. This family, led by Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet, has found its safe heaven in a modest house next to an uncompleted highway. A brilliant idea, at once unlikely and meaningful, surreal and familiar, of miniature and colossal proportions: it provides the characters with a spectacular view, worthy of a western, that both connects them to the world and isolate them, all the while letting them believe that it gives them time to see danger coming. But it is a fragile balance and the view, of course, is going to get blocked. The roadworks resume, the highway opens, the horizon closes, and things do go wrong. When thousands of cars rush by their front lawn everyday, what used to be a playground turns into an impassable barrier, a space unsuitable for life. So why do they stay? Because, as one of the sisters says to her brother, this is the only place where mummy feels good. Based on that bigger than life argument, Ursula Meir keeps questioning that obstinacy, in what she calls herself “a reversed road movie”. Isabelle Huppert embodies so well that stubbornness, that of a childish happiness, the kind which, when thinking it has reality under control, refuses to realise that it is in fact denying it, and prefers to endure the pure, gratuitous violence that starts breaking loose. (AT)