Ursula Meier's Home (2008)

This first feature by Franco-Swiss director Ursula Meier is a slightly humorous, almost surreal film of a family whose contented existence turns to hell.

At first the family – mother Marthe (Isabelle Huppert), husband Michel (Olivier Gourmet), older daughter Judith (Adelaïde Lennoix), younger daughter Marion (Madeleine Budd) and son Julien (Kacey Mottet Klein) – are in a strange but healthy environment: they are in an isolated house in the countryside next to a disused road. Olivier goes to work in his car, Marthe is the housewife, the younger kids walk to school across the fields, and Judith just listens to music on the radio in a deckchair with a bikini on.

And then they learn from the radio that the road is being re-tarmacked in preparation for a new incarnation. Their life of hell begins as heavy traffic comes and the noise is unbearable. During an accident there is a traffic jam, with stationary motorists ogling Judith and leaving a pile of litter on their doorstep.

Their reactions are different, as is their attitude to the health hazard of the pollution. Judith leaves, they argue, and then Michel has the crazy idea of shutting out the noise by clothing the house in fibreglass insulation and breezeblocks. This may make the house quiet, but it doesn't make for good breathing. The only option is to walk away.

Delphine Lehericey's Le Milieu de l'horizon (2019)

This Swiss-Belgian film is set in an unnamed place in 1976 and adapted from Roland Buti's 2013 novel of the same name. It's entirely set in a rural context, mainly in and around a farm during a period of severe drought in which animals are dying, crops are rotting through lack of water, and a farmer has killed himself due to the situation. Jean (Thibaut Evrard) took his farm over from his father and it now looks as if he's facing ruin.

But Le Milieu de l'horizon is seen exclusively through the eyes of Jean's thirteen-year-old son Gus (Luc Bruchez), who's obviously obsessed with sex, steals soft porn magazines from the local store and gloats over them, even ogles the breasts of his mother Nicole (Laetitia Casta), gets upset when he sees his older sister Léa (Lisa Harder) kissing her boyfriend, etc. So sex in some way or other is his main interest when he's not helping his father and his mentally handicapped cousin Rudy (Fred Hotier) collect up the dead factory-farmed chickens, milk the cattle or whatever.

But at the heart of this film, and really at the heart of the drama (and this is in part what makes the movie so interesting and unusual) is the presence of the new arrival to the film for a few days: Nicole's friend Cécile (Clémence Poésy), who like Nicole appears to be fanatical about a book club they're in. And although we see Cécile handing Nicole a book over the dining room table, we don't actually hear either of them talking about books. Some time later, after Gus's sort-of girlfriend Mado (Sasha Gravat Harsch) and of course Gus himself has discovered the real nature of the relationship, he (in a mixture of embarrassment and disgust) tears out the f.e.p. of a copy of Romain Gary's (here as Émile Ajar) La Vie devant soi. On it was Cécile's confession of undying love to his mother.

And that's a good title to choose: what kind of life does this family have in front of it with a failing farm and a lesbian mother? At the dinner table again, Léa is probably joking innocently when she says Gus is sulking because 'Il est jaloux, il a plus sa maman maintenant' ('He's jealous because he's lost his mother now'). But it's at this same table that Jean will angrily storm at Nicole about her contact with Cécile, and soon the whole village is talking about it and it's going to cause, directly or indirectly, quite an amount of violence. This is a highly watchable psychological thriller certainly shot on a low budget.

Lionel Baier's La Vanité (1996)

I've been watching a lot of films of late, so I shall usually be brief in giving a description of them. This is a kind of black comedy. David Miller (Patrick Lapp) is a sick and elderly widow who wants to end his life, and this is Switzerland. Esperantza (Carmen Maura, and yeah, the name's pathetic) is his helper, who does everything in her power to prevent him doing it: her late husband was born on the same day.

And then there's Tréplev (Ivan Georgiev) in the neighbouring hotel room, a male Russian prostitute with wobbly French. He also has a wife and kids, and he's willing to be a witness to the death but then David is so (purely academically) interested in Tréplev, his life, his charges (€300, but would he accept 250?) that things get really complicated. Why should David die?

Patricia Plattner's Les Petites Couleurs (2005)

Generally considered as Patricia Plattner's best film, this is one of several she made of women recovering their dignity and their independence. And it's a little gem. Battered by her husband Francis (Christian Grégori), hairdresser Christelle (Anouk Grinberg) escapes with her brand new, technologically advanced hairdressing machine, driving until she chances upon the Hôtel Galaxy, a place which has a very masculine atmosphere and live acts in the evening, but is run by the firm, no-nonsense-taking Mona (Bernadette Lafont).

Christelle is very fragile, cowed into submission over many years by her terrifying husband, and when she confesses to Mona that she has no money because Francis controls the banking, Mona melts. Christelle now has a job at the hotel, so she can stay there as long as she likes. Furthermore, she discovers an old, disused VW van on the hotel premises, which Mona has forgotten about and Christelle renovates, allowing her to re-begin her business as a neighbourhood, travelling hairdresser.

But she doesn't do this without the help of the gentle trucker Lucien (Philippe Bas), who becomes obsessed with Christelle, although Christelle takes a long time to respond to Lucien's attentions, at first treating the relationship on a brother-sister level: but then, she has a long history of abuse to recover from, and hormones aren't the first thing on her mind: she slowly has to become a new woman, not an appendage to a male.

Bernadette Lafont never appeared in one of Jacques Demy's films, although the ficticious television programme that Mona and Christelle love to watch, 'Le Ranch de l'amour', is an obvious wink to such all-singing Demy films as Les Parapluies de Cherbourg and Une chambre en ville. A joy to watch.

Patricia Plattner's Bazar (2009)

This may not be Patricia Plattner's most successful film, although it's highly entertaining, and an interesting study of ageist and classist behaviour. Plattner was a friend of Bernadette Lafont, who was quite a Nouvelle Vague figure in her time, starring in Truffaut's short Les Mistons (1957) and Eustache's epic masterpiece La Madam et la putain (1973). She died four years after the making of this film. And this was in fact Plattner's final film: she died in 2016 aged sixty-three.

Lafont plays Gabrielle, an antiquarian who is evicted from her shop and falls into the arms of the handsome working-class Fred (Pio Marmaï), who at twenty-five is forty years younger than Gabrielle. Of course it can't last, but the righteous indignation of her peers is evidently not shared by the viewer: it's a treat to see Gabrielle living her brief dream. One of the most amusing scenes for me is when Fred interrupts a conversation between Gabrielle and her daughter Elvire (Lou Doillon): he's naked apart from an open shirt, his penis dangling unselfconsciously.

Claude Goretta's Pas si méchant que ça | The Wonderful Crook (1974)

Claude Goretta got his idea for Pas si méchant que ça from two news stories: one about the head of a Swiss business in financial difficulties who could only pay his employees by staging hold-ups, and the other of a man who kidnapped the son of a CEO by making him laugh by dressing up as Pinocchio. The idea is that, well, the robber here, Pierre (Gérard Depardieu), tries to calm his victims by showing them that he's not as nasty as that.

Pierre and his wife Marthe (Dominique Labourier) are living a comfortable bourgeois existence in the family woodcraft business which his father (until illness and death) has always been in charge of. And then things go wrong, the artisanal practice is menaced by plastic. But Pierre doesn't want to sack anyone, he'd rather rob businesses than that. And then one day he robs a post office, fires a shot at the ceiling and Nelly (Marlène Jobert) faints. Pierre rushes over the other side of the counter to help her and that's the start of a weird friendship. How was she to know that the gun was no longer loaded?

Eventually they become lovers, she – much to his disgust – even carries out a hold-up herself, heavily disguised and holding up an instruction card to hide her sex. Pierre's leading a double life, both very separate from the other. Until he's inevitably caught and the two women can only look on as the police arrest him.

Claude Goretta's Jean-Luc Persécuté | Jean-Luc Persecuted (1966)

This is a devastating téléfilm adapted from the equally devastating novel of the same name by Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz, published in 1908 and also reviewed on this blog. It's a faithful adapatation, set in the Swiss mountains and depicting a very bleak environment of deep snow, marital infidelity, alcoholism, madness, murder and suicide.

The lead role of Jean-Luc is played by Maurice Garrel, the father of film director Philippe and grandfather of Louis. Jean-Luc makes his living felling trees and is married to Cristine (Frédérique Meininger), who loves Augustin (Philippe Mentha), but he left some time before and now she is married to Jean-Luc and has a baby by him. But then Augustin returns, Jean-Luc discovers that she's secretly seeing him, which she openlly admits with defiance, and so begins his rapid decline.

When their young child dies Jean-Luc refuses to believe it and continues to cradle the imaginary creature in his arms, drinks heavily and slides into psychosis. Cristine has a baby by Augustin, Jean-Luc locks both his wife and the child in a barn, sets fire to it and throws himself from a mountain.