Mobile Homes (2018)

Good movie, but best of all time? Hardly . . .

It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

The best films of this genre always show a path and provide a takeaway for being a better person.

The movie's not perfect, but it sticks the landing of its message. It was engaging - thrilling at times - and I personally thought it was a great time.

This film tells the story of a woman with a young son and a irresponsible boyfriend. They drift around because they have no money.The story is slow, and it is not very engaging. They seem to leave a trail of destruction wherever they go, and I just cannot feel for the family. It is hard to feel sorry for the woman because she just can't change her ways, for example she even has to keep stealing little items from the guy who helps her.

Can someone actually change their life? That is the question Director/Writer Vladimir de Fontenay (primarily a Short's director) poses in this gritty yet heart-wrenching look at wayward mother (Imogen Poots "That Awarkard Moment" 2014), her abusive and demanding boyfriend Evan (Callum Turner "The Only Boy Living in New York" 2017) - a role originally slated for Anton Yelchin before his death, her young impressionable son ( new comer Frank Oulton) and mobile home builder/seller Robert (Callum Keith Rennie "Californication "). What de Fontenay and cinematographer Benoit Soler do right here is place the audience directly in the seat of the actors, enable us to live their chaotic lifestyle and experience their cold Canada environment. Along with de Fontenay's terrific realistic direction, across the board the actors make the audience despise who they are and what they are doing, yet equally make the viewer wish them better life choices. Young Outlon and Keith Rennie stand out here because they are so contradictory to what the stories premise. Thus, they keep the audience glued to the screen and their characters. "Mobile Homes" is an indie film that probably won't make it to the big screen. However, you should find it in other formats. This film was screened at the Palm Springs International Film Festival #PSIFF2018

I had the luck to watch "Mobile Homes" at the Athens International Film Festival tonight,and what an amazing chance that was. This film is a documentation of almost every aspect of humanly experience and angst, based on the one of the most fundamental ones: the search for a home. The main characters, a young mother and her son, fought against themselves to realize what a home actually is. Every time they came close to an answer, they would meet the perplexity of themselves and would find a way to run away, until they would be found in the same place again. I did not want to write a review based on the scenes, or how the plot evolves, or how the characters move during the film. I couldn't wait to get home so that I could make a mere effort to write down everything I felt and feared and waited and longed for along with the characters. The director, Vladimir de Fontenay, got us hooked (I could feel the whole cinema room vibrating) with his incredible ability to comprehend and portray the antithesis between danger and that homely feeling, between being tired and getting some rest in a motherly hug, between abandonment and that risk to reproach the one who abandons, between familiarity and cold and foreign spaces and neighborhoods and homes. I could find my self identifying with situations I have never been to, getting upset with faces I have never met and will never meet and caring so much about characters that were fictional. And I think that constitutes a great film: the intimacy it can build so that one can bring the characters into life, into one's own life. The director, in a Q & A after the film, claimed that he likes to write about worlds that are unknown to him, claiming that he can better connect to unfamiliarity this way. I feel like he managed to create a film that had us all connected into that same space, where we all are children of a mother, longing for familiarity and warmth, watching our bodies being created as they are shaped through painful and rigid realities. If you too long for a home of your own, or even if you want to take a glimpse of what that search takes, this film is a must watch. It's true, simple in its brilliant portrayal of family, moving, it gets you angry and upset but also protective and strong. You feel all the feelings and look for all the lookings. 10/10p.s Mr Vladimir de Fontenay (the director) was so down to earth and spoke so beautifully, truly devoted his time to express what he felt and thought to his audience. Beautiful minds equal beautiful films.