Home is Where the Art is

French cinema at the Cambridge Film Festival by Isabelle McNeill

We’ve all heard the cliché: home is where the heart is. In this commonplace idiom the very idea of ‘home’ expresses a profound emotional attachment. It implies that as we wander through the world we leave our hearts at home, a holding place for the fragile core of our being. If it always draws us back, it is because we are compelled to return to where we left ourselves. Often, beyond bricks and stones, houses are homes containing our memories and identities. Although the French language lacks an equivalent of the English word home, the way in which buildings are imbued with emotional memory and a sense of identity has become something of an obsession in French cinema lately. Such diverse films as Manuel Poirier’s LA MAISON (2007), Michel Léviant’s IN MEMORY OF US (2007), Jean Becker’s CONVERSATIONS WITH MY GARDENER (2007) and CYCLES by Cyril Gelblat (2008) all offer insight into the relationship between particular places and personal history.

IN MEMORY OF US revolves around the rural childhood home of its central character, Jeanne. The film opens as her friends converge at the house for her funeral: she has committed suicide, having withdrawn into a recluse-like existence and gradually been abandoned by the same friends who now reappear to mourn her. Shot a decade earlier in the same location, flashbacks of a summer holiday at Jeanne’s house gradually reveal this moment of sharing her home with friends to be a traumatic turning point in her life, from which she was never able to move on. Ostensibly a place of shelter from which she is reluctant to move away, her home eventually imprisons her in the past, its treasured rooms and relics reminding her of all that she has lost instead of comforting her with memories of childhood security.

Seeking reassurance within familiar walls is a recurrent theme in these films. The well-to-do painter in CONVERSATIONS WITH MY GARDENER returns to his childhood home when his wife decides to divorce him. Just as the “fairy wall” – a garden wall associated for Jeanne with a
magical childhood memory no-one else seems to understand – in Léviant’s film becomes the conceptual focus of Jeanne’s longing for stability, so the garden in Becker’s portrait of male friendship is the site of the painter’s desire to return to his roots. His emotional return to his past, taking him far away from his worldly Parisian existence, is a gradual process. It takes place alongside the nurturing of his garden by an old school friend who has lead a completely different life of backbreaking labour. The power of home to persist as part of us even when we have left it far behind is evident in the simple connection between the two very different men: the village is common ground between them, which the time elapsed since those shared days cannot shift.

CYCLES extends the exploration of childhood terrain further by evoking three different generations. One of the few such films to focus on an urban setting (Poirier’s LA MAISON also figures the childhood home as a rural idyll), CYCLES looks to the future as much as to the past. a poignant motif in the film shows 75-year old Frida returning to her old flat, expecting to find her late husband there and forgetting that it is now rented out. yet her son’s encounter with the tenant shows that new life is possible amid the memory frameworks of past dwellings. The French title LES MURS PORTEURS (load-bearing walls) reminds us metaphorically of the importance of what is transmitted by previous generations, even if physical locations change or are lost. This is central to the Jewish context of the film, since this family’s history is fundamentally marked, albeit in subtle ways, by the mass murder and displacement of the holocaust. But if these emotional supporting walls are strong enough, the film implies, we are also able to move on and embrace new
identities.

Ultimately then, the alternative meaning of the old expression is glimpsed: home is wherever the heart may be. in these increasingly mobile and shifting times, French cinema appears to be exploring how we find a home for ourselves between reconstructing the past and building a future.