Sofie, Homemaker: Petersen Banks on Undervalued Emotional Labor
Danish director Frelle Petersen’s latest title Home Sweet Home (Hjem kaere hjem) aims to showcase the significant emotional toll of home care through the character portrait of a pure hearted woman who descends into burn out. While it captures the demands of a profession often overlooked, including the the highs and lows of both sentiment and degradation such a profession entails, its ultimately a predictable narrative which succeeds superficially, an awkward slice of hokum as pertains to its well-intentioned but passive-aggressive main protagonist. While certain moments may tug at the proverbial heart strings, Petersen’s insistence on how farming out empathy results in an automatic deficit at home is a bit broadly administered, which robs the narrative’s honorable intentions and feels more akin to white knighting.
Sofie (Jette Søndergaard) has just begun a new career as a home carer. During her first week of training, she’s introduced to a wide variety of patients and the vast range of care they require on her daily rounds. Quickly she’s confronted with the internal politics of the organization she works for, which includes various cut backs from administration as well as nagging personnel shortages. While nearly every one of Sofie’s clients warm quickly to her tenderness and care, there are others who seem beyond the pale, looking for someone they can lash out with their various resentments. As her emotional investment in her career grows, it begins to negatively affect her relationship at home with her ten-year-old daughter.
The essence and approach to Home Sweet Home feels like something Mike Leigh really could have nailed in an ensemble headed by Brenda Blethyn, Lesley Manville, or Sally Hawkins. The transparent approach plays like an installment in Norwegian filmmaker Dag Johan Haugerud’s Sex Dreams Love trilogy, but there’s a nagging, on-the-nose moralizing in the script which tends to fray his intentions. Petersen has heretofore gravitated towards intimate familial situations where characters are grappling with significant loss and/or disability amongst their kinfolk in such films as Uncle (2019) and Forever (2022), where letting go of the past and present suggests a more hopeful future. There are similar elements at play with Home Sweet Home, but there’s no baseline for Sofie other than having made a major career change for which she quickly feels impassioned about. What was she like before? How exactly has she transformed? Has her devotion to her passions always usurped her focus?
Where Home Sweet Home excels are in its generous cups of kindness, usually where Sofie shares a warm camaraderie with her clients, such as Else (Karen Tygesen). Ultimately, we’re able to see where that relationship will end from a mile off, but such manipulations hardly feel as egregiously irritating as Sofie’s constant confrontation with the onerous daughter of one client, Othea (Kirsten Hansen), a vile, unhappy harpy who doesn’t miss an opportunity to spackle the home health care team with vitriol. Certainly such people exist, and sometimes there’s no real recourse. However, Sofie is depicted as absorbing the abuse only to let it infect her interactions with others, such as a screaming match with a male cohort who is neglecting his duties.
But if these broad strokes can be overlooked, where Petersen really sells his heroine short is through her family life dynamics, which includes a young daughter who shrinks away from her mother’s increasingly terse behavior. This is complicated by Sofie sharing custody with an affable but significantly un-defined ex-husband and her role as a gymnastics coach for her daughter’s team. The third act resolution conspicuously revolves around whether the demeaned and exhausted Sofie should attend the omnipresent tournament in which her daughter is competing or else ruin her child’s experience by upsetting her from the bleachers. Jette Søndergaard, who has starred in Petersen’s last three features, gives a sympathetic, committed performance, even when the script is undermining her characterization. But she’s not enough to bring Home Sweet Home out of banal foreclosure.
Reviewed on February 14th at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival (75th edition) – Panorama. 112 mins.
★★/☆☆☆☆☆
