Home, a film starring Isabelle Huppert

In Home, Isabelle Huppert plays a mother descending into madness when modern life rips her family apart, by first-time director Ursual Meier.

Home, the debut movie of French-Swiss director Ursula Meier, depicts a bohemian family growing up next to a disused freeway, whose idyllic life falls apart when the highway opens and noise and traffic intrude. Isabelle Huppert is excellent as the family's mother.

Ursual Meier

Director, Ursual Meier: Home tells the story of a family which lives in an isolated place, as if on a desert island, near an empty motorway.

The motorway hasn't been used since its construction ten years ago. It is the beginning of summer and the motorway is about to open. Literally planted

The idea for Home came to me while driving looking at what was beside the motorway: often there were houses only a few metres away, with people in the garden, tables a few metres from exhaust pipes, or even houses with the windows bricked up.

The houses were like stories passing on the other side of my car window. I wanted to change the perspective, to look at things from the other point of view, and to use fiction to discover and invent what people saw or had seen from their windows night and day.

Like all my other films, Home tells the story of obsessive characters, who go to the point of exhaustion, who plunge into madness. It is also a film situated at the limits of different kinds of film: the burlesque, suspense, drama.

Isabelle Huppert. [More Isabelle Huppert]

Isabelle Huppert. [More Isabelle Huppert]

Isabelle Huppert. [More Isabelle Huppert]

Isabelle Huppert

Isabelle Huppert: I was given the script when I was in Belgium making Joachim Lafosse's Private Property. Joachim talked to me very positively about it and suggested very strongly that I should do it. It was a good connection and a very good approach. I found the script was special, very detailed. It was never psychological, but it expressed what the movie would turn out to be.

Also, it was produced by Denis Freyd, a very good French producer who has worked with the Dardennes Brothers and Abderrahmane Sissako, with whom I had worked before on Saint Cyr -- so all the connections were very good.

Home plays on several different levels. It's not psychological, it's more like a fable. It's not just realistic, but also surrealistic. And the characters in the film are like archetypes. The mother, the father and the three children -- it's like an example of any family in the world. It's not just a portrait of a family in this particular situation.

Marthe, the mother, feels she's in a paradise. But when the outside world makes itself felt, she feels that if she leaves, she will have to confront things that she doesn't want to confront. Her situation seems protective but, in fact, it’s more like a prison. What's great about Home is that it is always taking definitions like that -- the idea of paradise -- and redefining them as something else -- in this case a prison.

I respond to a good role in a good film. I'm not here to help directors, you know. In general, you reach a compromise with the reality of what is offered to you or is not offered to you. But for me, the motivation is working with interesting directors. If you take for example The Piano Teacher, I definitely did it with Michael Haneke, but I wouldn't have done it with anyone else. Picking a good director, a good part, a good role, is 80 percent of the task. But, if Michael Haneke or Claude Chabrol comes to me, I do it anyway, without reading the script.

Armand Whyte

Armand Whyte's opinion: Home, about the disintegration of family when the outside world encroaches, is a perfect vehicle for Isabelle Huppert, who can play loving mother with a hint here and there that not all is well. Hupperta achieves so much with small means: looks, glances, smiles, gestures. This is a fine film debut by director Ursula Meier.

Buy Isabelle Huppert's hottest movies: Home , The Piano Teacher (Unrated Edition), Home, and Ma Mere.

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