Father Mother Sister Brother

London Film Festival Film #5

As I left the screening of Father Mother Sister Brother I heard so much murmuring of people completely underwhelmed with this film. Not satisfied, a lot of people saying they were bored, they felt sleepy and that honestly saddened me so much because I think there is a magic with Jarmusch films and there is magic in this film that was lost on a lot of people.

This film is an anthology, which I know doesn’t work with a lot of people. It’s fragmented storytelling and gives you less time to invest in characters, but I’ve always had a bit of a soft spot for anthology filmmaking, because it leans on being more thematically inclined, and finding a through line through different stories. I think that’s the great joy of very deeply personal cinema, is finding connection to it and finding a through line with your life experiences and the film. In my opinion anthology filmmaking, when done well, just gives more room for this.

I thought this one was magnificent. Sure it’s slow and takes a little while to get into the rhythm that it’s going at, but it’s very in line with other Jarmusch work. It’s so steeped in realism, and as it plays out, both the father and mother chapters deal with a stilted relationship between parents and their children. It’s reflective of how the parental choices made throughout their lives have made them into the people they are today, and have calcified the relationship between parent and child.

In both scenarios we’re treated to really odd families relationships, they feel forced or performative, like family is the only reason they’re there. We’re dealing with absent parents in different ways and that being connective tissue between them.

In the sister brother story, on the surface it feels different, like it’s juxtaposing the previous instalments, we see a familial relationship which is tighter, a relationship which feels worn in and natural. But it’s still dealing with this idea of absent parents. 

These children who are only now discovering about their parents, because they were kept at a distance from them. I really truly thought this was just a wonderful exploration of family dynamics, something that felt so based in realism.

It has a fair bit of comedy in it but I think the entire film is tinged with this deep sadness, that we will never really know anybody, that sometimes familial relationships are out of obligation and they’re not real. It’s all very glossy. 

There’s definitely some issues, there’s through lines, in particular comedy, that don’t really work but equally there’s parallels between the three stories that I think just hammer home the artificial nature of some familial relationships that I thought that was wonderful. It’s a little rough around the edges but gosh if you engage with this you could get a lot of it. I mean it also has Cate Blanchett in yet another weird ass haircut so yet another reason to go see this