REVIEWS Coming Home REVIEWED BY JONATHAN ROMNEY
An extreme situation is fatally diluted by over- aesthetic treatment in Coming Home, a picture of enforced imprisonment that is never as unsettling or as enlightening as it might have been. The story has strong parallels with the Austrian case of Natascha Kampusch, kidnapped and imprisoned in a cellar for more than eight years — though a prefatory caption insists Coming Home (A Moi Seule) is not based on real events. However, this project by writer-director
Frédéric Videau, his belated second feature after 2003’s Variété Francaise, has the misfortune of entering an already crowded field of imprison- ment stories — most memorably, Markus Sch- leinzer’s recent Michael; Lola Doillon’s prisoner/ hostage two-hander In Your Hands; even, tenu- ously, Pedro Almodovar’s The Skin I Live In. The action starts with taciturn sawmill worker
Vincent (Reda Kateb, from A Prophet) abruptly punching a colleague, then returning to his secluded rural home where he opens a trap door and makes it clear to 17-year-old Gaelle (Bonitzer) that she is free to leave. Gaelle, who has been his hostage for eight
years, is quick to make her getaway, and much of the subsequent action — edited together jigsaw- style — focuses on her attempts to return to her
COMPETITION
Fr. 2012. 91mins Director/screenplay Frédéric Videau Production companies Les Films Hatari, Studio Orlando International sales Pyramide International,
www.pyramidefilms.com Producer Laetitia Fevre Cinematography Marc Tévanian Editor Francois Quiqueré Production designer Catherine Mananes Music Florent Marchet Main cast Agathe Bonitzer, Reda Kateb, Hélene Fillieres, Jacques Bonnaffé, Noémie Lvovsky, Margot Couture
not entirely surprising twists on the situation. There is no sexual abuse on Vincent’s side (power and possession seem to be his kicks), and when the older Gaelle makes an advance on him, he recoils in horror. For much of the time, she is the real power in
the relationship, taunting him and bossing him around, at least until his temper turns. It is clearly a decision of Videau not to psychoanalyse Vincent too much, but this leaves the character — played with disarming gentleness by Kateb — as an unknowable, not entirely believable figure. The film’s real energy comes from Bonitzer — a
striking and individual performance, though at moments too obviously in the French tradition of female teens for whom sulky defiance is a default mode. The film’s construction complicates mat- ters — both for chronology and for getting a firm angle on Gaelle — by having her radically re-dye her hair throughout, a platinum bleach at one point giving her a distractingly bizarre look. The air of unreality is accentuated by Marc
old life, via a preliminary stay at a mental institu- tion under the care of sympathetic shrink Anne (an imposing but underused Hélene Fillieres). She is also reunited with her now-separated par- ents (Noémie Lvovsky and Jacques Bonnaffé, both affecting in very different registers). In between, we see the strange turns of the
relationship between loner Vincent and Gaelle, played by Bonitzer and as a 10-year-old by the impressive Margot Couture. Videau offers some
Tévanian’s bleached-out photography, which cloaks the film in somewhat depressive autumnal pallor. Whatever psychological truths Coming Home might have imparted are hostage to this distancing aestheticism. Meanwhile, Florent Marchet’s somewhat Nymanesque score is inventive but too distracting.
SCREEN SCORE ★★
February 15, 2012 09:00 h Berlinale Palast - Press Screening (English subtitles)
16.30 h Berlinale Palast - Gala Screening (German subtitles, translation via head- phones available)
February 16, 2012 09:30 h Friedrichstadt-Palast - Repetition screening (English subtitles)
20:30 h Friedrichstadt-Palast - Repetition screening (German subtitles)
February 19, 2012 22:15 h Haus der Berliner Festspiele - Repetition screening (German subtitles)
WORLD SALES The Match Factory
at Berlinale
February 9th - February 19th, 2012 Martin-Gropius-Building, Booth #35 Email:
info@matchfactory.de www.the-match-factory.com
n 16 Screen International at the Berlinale February 11, 2012
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