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Farewell, Home Sweet Home

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From the liner notes

Winner of the Prestigious European Critics’ Award (Prix FIPRESCI), Otar Iosseliani’s Farewell, Home Sweet Home is a stunningly poetic, surrealist comedy of family manners and class consciousness. In a suburban Parisian chateau, a lovable souse (played by Iosseliani himself) fools around with his electric train set while his wife, a high-powered businesswoman, entertains her society friends with a gigantic stork perched on her shoulder. Meanwhile, the couple’s teenage son forsakes the family chateau for café “society,” preferring the company of its denizens - Parisian dropouts, immigrants, and street thugs - to home life. Told in a series of sublime vignettes, the seemingly disparate narrative threads are linked via tracking shots of breathtaking beauty. Combining the class-conscious irony of Luis Buñuel and the near-silent comedy of Jacques Tati, Time Out Magazine’s Film Guide hails Iosseliani’s Farewell, Home Sweet Home as a “hugely charming piece, wondrously inventive, consistently witty, engaging in its devotion to the joys of wine, women and song.”

Review

The whimsical yet unnecessarily lengthy films of Georgian (Soviet, not peach) director Otar Iosseliani have become critical favorites in recent years. Farewell, Home Sweet Home is a good introduction to his work, with its quirkily droll humor and a concentration on atmosphere rather than plot. The spoiled yet ambitious son of a stork-loving mother and toy train obsessed father decides to make a living within working class society. This character leads viewers through humorous, slice-of-life styled introductions to the town’s denizens who break hearts, laws, and empty bottles of wine. Characters enter and exit the loose narrative in an appropriately Slackeresque manner. The camera lingers on images for what sometimes feels forever such as those of departing boats that must completely exit the frame before a cut is made. As the film follows an unpredictable path to its lackluster finale, subtle character arcs slowly become apparent that lend a poetic-like quality to the most simple of images. If Buñuel directed Amarcord then it would have looked a lot like this, though it would have been much better.

-- Eric Bresler