Film - Jonathan Romney is dazzled by a fabulous wayward fantasia
The Georgian director Otar Iosseliani may be a marginal name in the official history of world cinema, but he is one of the most inspired film-makers working today (Andrei Tarkovsky certainly thought so), and by far one of the most eccentric. You come away from his films amazed that anyone could have dreamt of making them: Iosseliani is, to all intents and purposes, a Martian auteur, although he comes, in fact, from Tbilisi via Paris, where his latest film, Farewell Home Sweet Home, is set.
The French title is Adieu Plancher des Vaches - "plancher des vaches" (literally, "cows' floor") being a derisive sea-going term for terra firma. A story about people who go drifting, weary of home and fixed identity, the film itself is one long drift that refuses to anchor to any character or story strand. It is a shaggy-dog tale told by a drunkard, rather like Iosseliani's previous British release, Favourites of the Moon (1984), in which a sprawl of comic events revolves around the circulation of a set of Sevres china. Farewell Home Sweet Home contains a high degree of vitriolic farce, but it is cloaked in a gentle, dreamlike near-silence (dialogue only partly matters here). This is comedy that makes you drop your jaw in amazement, rather than laugh out loud.
The point with Farewell is not so much what it is about as where it goes. It begins with a family living in a grand French chateau, where the elderly father (played by Iosseliani himself) lounges around in his den with his train set and his booze, while his wife (Lily Lavinia) hosts musical soirees, escorted by her pet marabou stork. Their teenage son, meanwhile, sneaks off to Paris, where he hangs out with a band of homeless people and holds down two jobs - one as a window cleaner, the other as a washer-up in a posh restaurant. He is in love with a girl from the cafe opposite, but she fancies a suave Lothario on a fancy bike, who tries to lure her to a pleasure boat that is also used as a trysting place by a sleazy businessman who's up to no good with the lady from the castle.
And so on and so forth. The narrative shifts from moment to moment, following no obvious pattern, but momentarily latching on to whatever happens to pass into shot. For a while, the story looks as if it might follow the well-heeled lover, in reality an impoverished railway cleaner who has his bike on loan from a local gang. Then we expect to find out what the mother is up to, flying off by helicopter to sign business deals disguised in a black bobbed wig. But, tantalisingly, Iosseliani follows people as it takes his fancy: introducing an intrigue between a couple of antiquarians, or briefly following an African couple, then abruptly forgetting them. For Iosseliani, a shot is like a wide public space - someone crosses the road, and he'll watch them for a while, see who they talk to, follow the other person for a bit. It may seem random at times, but it is brilliantly mapped out and storyboarded; we're always aware of an overall design, however obscure. Iosseliani's penchant for shooting frontally and in long shot, following characters along streets, gives the film an unusually horizontal feel, so that it resembles a frieze with representative figures (the Father, the Mother, the Butler) embroidered into it.
Not every event is a sight gag as such, but everything has the potential to become one. As well as echoing the disjointed urban surrealism of Luis Bunuel's late French films, Iosseliani has learnt a certain dry distance from his heroes Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. In one scene, the businessman has a furious outburst, but we watch him through a closed window, with traffic on the soundtrack, so we have no idea what he's ranting about. Iosseliani likes to keep us one step behind - why is a goat being led into the building where a boy is practising the violin? Because it is a vet's surgery, but we don't discover that until a moment later. Two joggers drift by for no apparent reason: about ten minutes later, they are the subject of an inspired sight gag. Sound is similarly disorienting: there's a brilliant riff on the conventional passage-of-time shorthand, as a montage shows the change of seasons outside a prison window, while inside, bizarrely, the inmates seem to be singing grand opera.
The film's world-view is of a city of transients in which everyone is in disguise and everyone is after something, where nothing and nobody can be trusted or taken at face value - even a dog is circulated as a disguise accessory. The apparent flippancy is a kind of inverse seriousness, with all events presented as equally important or trivial. A murder, a mugging, a bank robbery - all are observed as laconically as a lovers' tiff or a couple of drunks sharing a perfectly pitched round of plainsong.
The whole world of the film is a manifestly artificial one, built out of set-dressing and no more permanent or realistic than the father's train set. At the end, in keeping with the title, Iosseliani drifts off into the blue, in a remarkably beautiful pay-off. Farewell Home Sweet Home is dazzlingly strange and, even at two hours, frustratingly brief: a fabulous wayward fantasia that feels as if it could expand to take in the entire universe.
Farewell Home Sweet Home is at the ICA Cinema, London, until 24 August (020-7930 3647)
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