With another lockdown looming, let’s cast our minds back to June when Netflix released Homemade, a collection of short films made by renowned filmmakers across the globe. Though each commissioned artist had only 10 days to come up with a 10-minute long piece, the collection was generally criticised for being out-of-touch and self-indulgent. However, here are a selection of those I felt were worth watching.
Episode 2: Paolo Sorrentino
Though a huge departure from what we expect from Sorrentino with renowned works such as Il Divo, The Great Beauty or his TV series The New Pope, this film is light, fun and nostalgic for those of us who once enjoyed creating worlds with our toy figurines. It follows the pope and the queen and it is, according to Sorrentino, “a story of solitude, of melancholy between them’” as “they are both people who have lived their whole lives in lockdown” – although, like Sorrentino himself, in clearly quite a lavish way. Sorrentino described it as “a sort of return to the beginning of my life as a director” as “I did exactly this kind of stuff – making movies alone at home with a VHS camera”.
Episode 4: Pablo Larraín
The Chilean filmmaker, who devised the whole project, is renowned for his 2016 film, Jackie. His short film initially evokes the tragic spirit of Gabriel Garcia Marques’ Love in the Time of Cholera as a desperate elderly lothario contacts an old flame from a care home. This tragicomic piece is certainly the most entertaining of all the films and proves cinematographically that the video call format is dramatic and effective.
Episode 9: David McKenzie
The Scottish director of Hell and High Water takes us through snapshots of a Glasgow teen’s life under lockdown, seizing on the tedium and strangeness, flights of imagination and fleeting moments of connection. The excerpts flow nicely and it’s the most natural of all the films. McKenzie creates beauty in the smallest, most mundane things – such as his daughter playing with a bit of thread – and constructs a narrative that shows us there is joy to be found even in isolated times.
Episode 10: Maggie Gyllenhaal
This surreal sci-fi is Gyllenhaal’s filmmaking debut. It stars her husband Peter Sarsgaard who plays a lonely man processing his grief while a deadly virus not only sweeps across the globe but the cosmos, and seems to be affecting the laws of physics. This, according to Peter Bradshaw, was “the most ambitious on a narrative level” of all the films. Gyllenhaal’s directing leaves us excited for her upcoming adaptation of Elena Ferrante’s novel, The Lost Daughter, with Olivia Coleman.
Episode 14: Kristen Stewart
Written, directed and starring Stewart, this film follows the actress stuck at home and suffering from insomnia – which seems to distort her sense of reality. The events that unfold seem disjointed as she restlessly mumbles to herself. In the press notes for the collection, Stewart says how “short films by nature don’t have to abide by any rules” and the film is successful not only in reflecting the character’s sense of restlessness, but as a showcase of Stewart’s acting talent with every mastered micro-expression.
Although, as Peter Bradshaw observes, Homemade does not reflect many experiences of genuine hardship and doesn’t accurately narrate everyone’s experience of lockdown, it is fun and inspiring to think about what we are capable of as we’re all experiencing a collective déjà-vu.
