All the World’s a Farm

The governing principle in these films is that they are director-driven. There are no big parts for stars, no genuflections to genre, no cars going through plate-glass windows, no folks in long coats haunting technoir cityscapes. Life is what is being observed and expressed here, and the filmmakers are true above all to what their imaginations have organically produced in the act of living. Otar Iosseliani‘s surrealist Farewell, Home Sweet Home is gratifying in this regard. The first scene focuses on a stoic little girl determined to entertain herself in a quiet alcove while her mother throws a loud party in the next room. She plays with blocks on the floor, but a maidservant tells her to sit in a chair and draw. The instant she grows comfortable in this, her mother bursts in and scolds her for not sitting in a ladylike way. Thus chased from her chair, the girl plucks a pretty knickknack from the windowsill, only to be scolded again: “That’s not a toy.”

Every lonely, misunderstood moment of every childhood in the universe feels distilled into these few minutes of screen time -- and for a second we may fall into the playful trap of assuming this little girl is going to be our heroine, and that we‘re in a sharply lit corner of Truffaut-land. That’s about when the stork walks in. There‘s no narrative explanation for this creature. The mean mother fawns over him as if he’s a visiting dignitary; Iosseliani‘s camera eye dotes on him for what he is, a comedic marvel, a high-stepping, shy representative of the higher courts of insanity making the laws in this universe. When we leave the girl behind, what follows is a merry-go-round of involvements worthy of either Max Ophuls or Rube Goldberg. Everything connects. We follow the girl’s brother, some bullies he fights, a waitress he‘s in love with and the lying heel on a motorbike with whom she is happily-unhappily in love -- as well as an old man who plays with toy trains (played by the Georgian director himself). We don’t return to the girl until the film has come full circle; we seem to be in a world of Buñuelian lawlessness, freed from the weight of Buñuel‘s rage. Iosseliani is never blind to life’s agonies, but in response he‘s fashioned a sweet hymn to nonsense.