Home

These are my notes from our last screening.  On balance I enjoyed the film: it was typically French, and any attempt at a US remake would be disastrous.

Home


Switzerland 2009 98 minutes

Director: Ursula Meier

Starring: Isabelle Huppert, Olivier Gourmet, Adelaide Leroux and Jacques Gamblin

Nominations and Awards

• Swiss submission for Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film

• Six wins and five nominations


“It's a nightmare metaphor for the horrors of the modern world, but will seem like everyday reality to anyone living around Heathrow or any motorway.”

Philip French

Marthe (Isabelle Huppert) and Michael (Olivier Gourmet) are living a happy, semi-bohemian life with their three children in a remote decrepit house beside an unfinished motorway. Suddenly the motorway is opened and the family becomes isolated from school, workplace and even the shops: Marthe goes to pieces while Michel purchases insulating material to soundproof the house by blocking up all the windows.

Ursula Meier was born in eastern France close to the Swiss border and studied at the Belgium Institute of Visual Arts. After making her name with a number of prize-winning short films she directed Strong Shoulders (2003) as her first full length feature film. This film was selected for the series New Directors/New Films at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2003, with Home receiving its first US screening at the same event in 2009. The film was the official Swiss entry for the foreign language film in the 2009 Academy Awards, but it did not even make the shortlist: the Oscar went to Departures, a Japanese film about an apprentice undertaker.

She wrote the script of Home for Isabelle Huppert before she had even been cast and then searched across Europe for a suitable location before finding an unfinished motorway in Bulgaria and building a house next to it.

Save Our Libraries

I posted this in response to a question about which book changed your life, but it morphed into a statement in support of local libraries and as I used my local library to borrow film books I thought I'd re-post it here:


"I suppose it has to be the first book that I ever bought with my own money: Five Go To a Treasure Island.

Up to that point I'd been reading comics and picture stories, but after receiving a book token as a present from a generous relative my parents took me to a bookshop and I bought my first novel - the first of very many...

It was the books that I've read (combined with the support of my parents, teachers and a well-stocked local library) that got me through the History Entrance Exam after four terms in the sixth form (one of the questions concerned the value of the 19th century novel to the social historian so I wrote about Hardy, Dickens, Eliot and the Brontes). If you want to see what it was like, watch The History Boys.

In an era when the government is looking to cut library services please make sure you support your local libraries: they are far more cost effective than private education!

Declaration of interest: one of my sisters is now a librarian in the local library where I used to study."

Julie & Julia

I've just completed my notes for this week's screening:

Julie & Julia


USA 2009 123 minutes

Director: Nora Ephron

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams and Stanley Tucci

Nominations and Awards

• Oscar nomination for Best Actress (Meryl Streep)

• BAFTA nomination for Best Actress (Meryl Streep)

• A further 10 wins and 12 nominations


“...the two lives hang together and the experiences of their heroines placed alongside each other offer revelations about social and cultural change over the past 60 years, from the staid age of the telex and the manual typewriter to the ubiquity of the personal computer and the mobile phone.”

Philip French

In 2002 Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a young writer with an unpleasant day job in New York decides to enjoy herself by cooking every recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking (1961) by Julia Childs while blogging to document her progress. In a parallel story set in Paris in the 1950s Julia Childs (Meryl Streep) attends Le Cordon Bleu to learn about French cooking and begins work on a book about this for American housewives. After a mention of her blog in an article in The New York Times Powell is courted by a succession of journalists, literary agents and publishers, culminating in the publication of a best-selling book.

It was Streep who received the majority of the nominations and awards for her acting, but the performance of all three actors in the main roles was central to the success of the film, and these carry echoes of other films the actors have appeared in.  Julie begins to regard Julia as a mother figure and a source of inspiration to her, a relationship that echoes their roles in Doubt (2008) where Streep played the Mother Superior and Amy Adams the young nun.  In a similar happy accident of casting, Stanley Tucci as Julia’s humorous and considerate husband Paul, also played the devoted gay associate of Streep’s fashion magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada (2006).

In a career of more than 25 years Nora Ephron, initially as scriptwriter and subsequently as director, has been responsible for many successful films from Silkwood (1983) (starring Streep), Heartburn (1986) (once again with Streep) and When Harry Met Sally (1989) to Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and You’ve Got Mail (1998). Several of these films focus on people leading parallel lives, but for Julie & Julia she takes this plot structure to a different level by having them live in different periods and never meet, a structure that Stephen Daldry used for dramatic rather than comic effect in The Hours which followed the lives of three women (played by Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore and Meryl Streep again) whose only link was Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway.

Streep received her sixteenth Oscar nomination for her performance in this film. Her next performance will be as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady with Phyllida Lloyd, who previously directed Streep in Mamma Mia! (2008), as director and also starring Anthony Head as Geoffrey Howe and Richard E Grant as Michael Heseltine.