So someone tells of an American murderer who is released from prison after years and returns to his home country, where a terminally ill mother and a lot of hatred await him. The city and its people are grappling with very American problems, including opiate addiction. The search for forgiveness ultimately leads to the church, to a very American religiosity. All who play are American, except for one Irish woman who successfully pretends to be American too.
“Home” could be a thoroughly American film. Even in the great tradition of American, hyper-realistic independent cinema. This tradition requires, for example, that drug addicts are really almost walking skeletons, you won’t find a well-fed drug addict in such films. Then every gray hair has to be as real as possible, every tattoo has to be convincing, every flick of the tongue in the accents has to refer to a real place. And every reference to the past should come from a collectively verifiable, really lived American wealth of experience.
It all works too. Nearly. So good, in any case, that well-known American cinema veterans (Kathy Bates) and up-and-coming talent (Jake McLaughlin) immediately took part. The only thing that doesn’t fit is the filmmaker’s identity: Franka Potente, actress from Dülmen, became famous with “Run Lola Run” and then went to the USA, where she shot with Johnny Depp and Matt Damon. She now has an American husband (he plays the drug skeleton and has lost weight for it) and two children who only speak English. She drew this story entirely from herself, wrote the script and directed it. Still, she is not an American. She has to fake the wealth of experience she has lived.
The bigger question would now be whether this type of pretense doesn’t matter because everything in the cinema is constantly being faked anyway. Or not. “Home” is Franka Potente’s feature film debut and not a bad film. It’s the kind of film to which you nod approvingly and say: Never would have thought that it was by a German director. But that also means: really brave to play such a game as a debutante. Or to put it another way: Don’t you have to be pretty crazy to venture into the genre of cinema with your pretended experiences, in which a couple of legendary American truth fanatics have already made legendary films?
One would have preferred to see scenes that didn’t just pretend
Seen in this way, nothing is right in the details. It starts with the very first scene. The hero, just released from prison, drives his skateboard over the highway towards Heimatkaff. Lost young men on the highway home have been seen in a thousand American films, but not on a skateboard. Well, you think, an innovation. But then the man says which town he is going to, and a woman along the way says she doesn’t know where it is. And already at that moment you start to brood.
Shouldn’t the people in a deserted area like the one the protagonist is crossing know all the beetles along the highway? Within at least fifty miles, if not a hundred? So does Franka Potente mean with this scene that the hero still has a very, very long way to go? On the skateboard? On totally flat terrain? And why doesn’t he at least try to hitchhike a bit? Hundreds of miles of highway can be very, very long if you only drive on your own. Anyone who has only stumbled along hot American tarmac for a hundred meters will think the main character is crazy at that moment.
Maybe that’s a deliberate irritation with the aim of simply doing a few things differently. Unlike all the great films of hyper-realistic independent cinema before, which Franka Potente naturally grew up with. Or maybe the director didn’t mean to say anything, the dump is only a mile away, and the ignorance of the woman along the way is meaningless. The point is: someone who really comes from such an area would probably have written the scene in such a way that one doesn’t ponder pointlessly.
As much as you like to watch “Home” because the actors are all very good and the filmmaker really wants to tell something – you would have preferred a hundred times to see scenes that don’t just pretend. that Franka Potente really knows. It would be the feeling of being almost completely absorbed in the language and culture of America and yet looking at the country with a view that is about foreignness and must remain foreign. And seeing things that real Americans don’t see anymore. What do you need for that? Not much: a childhood away from the highways, far from Mainstreet USA. Let’s say in Dülmen.
Home, D / NL 2020 – Direction and script: Franka Potente. Camera: Frank Griebe. Editor: Antje Zynga. With Jake McLaughlin, Kathy Bates, Aisling Franciosi, Derek Richardson, James Jordan, Lil Rel Howery. World cinema film rental, 100 minutes.