I Want to Go Home (film)

I Want to Go Home
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Alain Resnais
Produced by	Marin Karmitz
Written by	Jules Feiffer
Starring	Adolph Green Gérard Depardieu Linda Lavin Micheline Presle
Music by	John Kander
Cinematography	Charles Van Damme
Edited by	Albert Jurgenson
Distributed by	MK2
Release date	27 September 1989 (1989-09-27) (France)
Running time	100 minutes
Country	France
Language	English and French

I Want to Go Home is a 1989 French film directed by Alain Resnais, from a screenplay by Jules Feiffer. It explores the differences between French and American cultural values through a story about a veteran cartoonist who encounters conflicting reactions to his work during a trip abroad.

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.

Adolph Green, as Joey Wellman
Laura Benson, as Elsie Wellman, Joey's daughter
Linda Lavin, as Lena Apthrop, Joey's partner
Gérard Depardieu, as Christian Gauthier
Micheline Presle, as Isabelle Gauthier, Christian's mother
John Ashton, as Harry Dempsey, an American film director in exile
Geraldine Chaplin, as Terry Armstrong

The project initially arose from Resnais's admiration for the plays of the American writer and illustrator Jules Feiffer. Although there was originally no intention of highlighting the comic-strip, Feiffer suggested using the character of a comic illustrator as the means of exploring American and French attitudes towards the appreciation of cartoons and comic-books. This appealed to Resnais's own longstanding enthusiasm for comic-strips, and allowed him to develop a film that was dense with references to cartoon characters and their creators. (Animated characters often appear within the frame to converse with one of the live-actors.) Resnais was also fascinated by the question of whether people could appreciate comics on the same level as a literary work such as one by Flaubert.