“Home” sticks to its title: In this movie, we never see the world beyond the acre or so surrounding the house in question. It sits at the side of a highway, unused.
Voices on the transistor radio tell us that the highway has been in bureaucratic limbo for 10 years, which explains why the family can live in the house in perfect silence. The road itself is their playground; they’ve got lounge chairs, sports equipment and other items parked there.
How did this family get there and why do they like it? We never find out in Ursula Meier’s kooky and surreal film, which presents this unit as a peculiar sort of Everyfamily, not quite real and not quite a cartoon.
They appear to be in domestic harmony at the beginning of the movie: playing and eating and, oddly, bathing nude together.
The parents are played by two favorites of French cinema, Isabelle Huppert and Olivier Gourmet (he was in “Lorna’s Silence”), both of whom seem dizzy with the crazy concept of the film. They have three kids: a grown daughter who likes to sunbathe, an adolescent daughter who occupies the obligatory skeptical role in relation to the rest of the family, and a rambunctious son.
This little Eden can’t last, because Edens never do. And so a highway crew tramps through one day, putting a new surface on the road and clearing out the debris.
The road is open to traffic.
When the cars begin passing by, life changes for this daft family. Huppert’s character, in particular, appears to be agoraphobic, and increasingly challenged by the intrusion of outside life into her world. Although it’s a minor role for this gifted actress, she brings all her skills to it.
What this warped fable means will be up to the viewer to decipher, as Meier is content to let us be spectators to this increasingly chaotic world. Is the adolescent daughter right in sensing toxic invasion from the highway? Where does the oldest daughter go when she wanders off? What is the family doing living here in the first place?
We don’t know, and the film is only marginally arresting enough to compel curiosity about the answers. But moviegoers with a taste for surrealism and the wilder side of the road might really take to it.
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