‘The House of the Wind’ Venice Review: A Cameroonian Director Turns His Camera On His Own Mother In This Unsentimental Family Portrait
An elderly woman in Cameroon, whose children have all emigrated to Europe, forms an unexpected bond with a young woman who asks her to pose as her mother. In Orizzonti.
Josette, the protagonist of The House of the Wind, is the director’s own mother. And while the story he tells on screen isn’t strictly autobiographical, he drew directly on their own experience to write it. In a sense, Josette’s situation —the character shares her real name— is identical to that of countless women in her position. She’s 80 years old and lives in Yaoundé, Cameroon. All six of her children have moved to Europe, most of them to France, leaving her alone in a house far too big for one person. They video call from time to time, always with the same promise —one none of them ever quite keeps— to come back and visit her, or better yet, to come back and live with her. But time passes, and nobody does.
Perhaps as a way of forcing their hand, Josette —who seems permanently caught somewhere between annoyed and outright furious— has decided to build another house, one she can’t really afford and that drags her through a maze of paperwork, made worse when she loses her ID. It’s in the middle of one of these bureaucratic detours that she meets Sarah (Moudjeu Pouadeu), a young woman who could easily be her daughter. Their paths cross a couple of times, and something like friendship begins to take shape between them — enough that Josette picks up on just how strained Sarah’s relationship with her own parents really is.
Even so, she’s caught off guard by the favor Sarah eventually asks of her. Sarah’s French boyfriend is coming to visit from France, and she wants Josette to pose as her mother. Josette hesitates, but the request ends up being the pretext that brings these two very different women together — a daughter at odds with her parents, and a mother her own children don’t seem to give her the attention she wants. Out of that unlikely meeting grows a warm, easy relationship, but one that won’t be free of friction.
What Kouemo Yanghu has made is a kind of tribute to his mother — though not a romanticized, overly tender, or condescending one. Josette is tough, dry, bad-tempered, at times even cruel, and she moves through the world with a permanently stern expression. Sarah, by contrast, is warmer and gentler, and it’s only gradually that something builds between the two of them: a substitute family for the one each is missing. Working in an observational, unhurried register, attuned to the small-town rhythms of an older woman set in her ways, the director uses the film as an excuse to be there, to point a camera at his mother and, quite possibly, at his own childhood home.
Seen from a certain angle, the shoot itself looks like something the director —who has lived in France for 20 years— invented as a way to get himself back to Cameroon, to spend a bit more time by her side. The fictional elements aren’t entirely true to life —there’s no filmmaker, for instance, among the sons and daughters who appear via Zoom— but reality keeps bleeding into the film throughout. And so The House of the Wind becomes, in the end, an excuse for him to spend more time with her. If the wish doesn’t quite come true for Josette within the fiction, it did, at least, come true in real life. And that, surely, matters more.
