I Want to Go Home
- warm
- brisk
- gentle
- intimate
Warm, kinetic, gentle comedy / satire, inventive in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.
How every film is hand-scored →Joey Wellman, an American cartoonist from Cleveland now largely forgotten at home, visits France with his partner Lena to attend an exhibition in Paris about the comic strip (bande dessinée) which features his work. He also hopes to be reconciled with his daughter Elsie who has been a student in Paris for two years, in flight from the American culture of which she sees her father as a typical example. Elsie is naively infatuated with French literature, and is trying to secure an introduction to the brilliant university professor Christian Gauthier, an expert on Flaubert but also an enthusiast for comic books. The meeting of father and daughter goes badly, but Elsie is persuaded to join Joey and Lena for the weekend at the country house of Gauthier's mother, Isabelle. During a comic-themed masquerade party, all of the characters are made to reconsider their present and past relationships.
Our read · I Want to Go Home (1989) reads as a warm, kinetic, inventive comedy · satire · comics entry — gentle in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.
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The shape of I Want to Go Home
What watching it is actually like.
“You want a quirky bilingual comedy about an American cartoonist clashing with French culture and family.”
Skip it tonight — You want fast-paced broad laughs or a conventional feel-good story.
The reading.
Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.
Eight films that read most like this one.
Closeness in the twelve-axis space — how the film actually reads, not “people also liked.”
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