Home (1998/I)

User Rating:

7.0/10   

Director:

Morag McKinnon

Writer:

Colin McLaren (writer)

Genre:

Short

Awards:

Won BAFTA Film Award. Another 5 wins

Cast

Russell Anderson
Raymond Mearns	...	Tory
Malcolm Shields

Runtime:

Sweden:11 min

Country:

UK

Color:

Color

Movie Connections:

Edited into Cinema16: British Short Films (2003) (V)

Familiar 'weird' subject matter enlivened by sense of style.

Despite the title, the hero of 'Home' is a wanderer, home-less in the sense that he visits other people's homes, but has none of his own. He is a Council inspector, checking up on a series of tenants who, of course, are a bit weird. First up are a pair of twins, a cross between Tweedledum and Tweedledee and 'Village of the Damned', with their strange, glazed-over eyes. We don't know why he's there (the other two are reported by nosey neighbours), but the boys' (unwittingly?) malevolent hospitality persuades him to give them a lease.

The second complaint is actually dead. The third seems like a frightening, Scottish, anarcho-syndacilist type who blusteringly threatens the council man, but is actually hiding an aging donkey, hopefully, but doubtfully, for reasons of animal welfare.

This award-winning film is open to interpretation, depending on how kind you're feeling. There is no doubt that the inspector is one of us, a Gulliver from the land of recognisable norms lost in a disorienting fantasy-land of freaks and strange animals. You could argue that this is another example of mocking the working classes as idle, shiftless and degenerate. Or that an underclass has been so long ignored and left fester by the ruling classes, that they have turned in on themselves, a kind of socio-economic incest bodying forth a lost, deformed, soul-destroyed peoples. It is the Inspector's normality, or the normality that gives him his authority that is to blame, only taking an interest in his subjects when they are complained about, exercising the power to simply walk in and out of their lives.

The world of the film is seriously unhinged - is the Inspector infected by it? It is when the film leaves off its Lynchian narrative, and concentrates on achieving unsettling visual effects that it really becomes magical. I never thought I'd see a cramped, rubbish-strewn council flat living-room look like a haunting, wind-swept Gothic castle. When the camera slows down (representing the Inspector's subjectivity?), suspending the image and its movement, as when a flock of birds suddenly, slowly rise, or when the stillness is filled with the gloriously unEnglish, keening czardas, you can see why people have been getting very excited.