Flasz On Film

Six years after his last directorial outing (The Dead Don’t Die), Jim Jarmusch has once more come out of hibernation and decided to revisit a storytelling format he has been fond of all throughout his career with Mystery Train, Night on Earth and Coffee and Cigarettes, namely the venerable anthology.

Father Mother Sister Brother is a triad of short stories, each depicting a family reunion underpinned by unexpressed emotion. A pair of siblings (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) go to see their estranged father (Tom Waits). A mother (Charlotte Rampling) invites her two daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps) for tea. A young woman (Indya Moore) meets her brother (Luka Sabbat) in Paris to reconnect after their parents die in a plane crash. Because this is after all a Jarmusch film, the stories share some elements of symmetry: a top-down shot of a coffee table, a fancy watch worn by one of the characters, a piece of understated deadpan humour, a slo-mo shot of skateboarding youngsters. Above all, though, these three scenes exhibit thematic symmetry as they all deal, each in its own way, with communication, language and emotional sincerity.

In the first scene we see the father leave crap all around his house and cover a nice couch with a terrible-looking blanket in anticipation of the arrival of his adult children in an attempt to hide his financial wellbeing from them. Whether it is to make sure they’d come back once more thinking they need to take care of him or because he wants to make the experience awkward enough for them never to come back is not answered.

In the second scene we hear the mother talk on the phone to a friend about having to meet her two adult daughters and how much of a chore it is to host them before having to suffer from the long stretches of awkward silence and meaningless chat. At the end of the scene, an embarrassing display of faux kinship masking bottled up exasperation fills the frame.

In the third scene, something different happens. Instead of witnessing how emotional walls are erected to separate the two people from each other, a bridge is built. The siblings bond over their shared memories of their parents and find warmth in mutual embrace.

Having sat through this piece of filmmaking the knee-jerk response might be to reject it as a theoretical experiment. A piece of didactic filmmaking coming from an ageing auteur whose last successful attempt at resonating emotionally on the same frequencies as his audiences was exactly a decade ago in his magnificent and soulful Paterson. Father Mother Sister Brother might register as preachy exactly because of these obvious elements of symmetry that the film wastes no time drawing attention to. In fact, Jarmusch is no stranger to pretentiousness as he infrequently—and mostly in his younger years—projected an image of manufactured coolness and opted to keep the viewers at arm’s length only to make his movies look more mysterious and artsy than they perhaps needed to be.

But under this seemingly thick layer of artifice you can still locate the same soulfulness and caustic wit that elevated Night on Earth, Only Lovers Left Alive, Broken Flowers and Paterson well beyond the baseline of what indie directors would typically reach for. There’s something quietly magical about Jim Jarmusch’s movies, especially when he lets his characters define the narrative, as opposed to imposing a message from the top in an attempt to say something meaningful at all cost. Granted, Father Mother Sister Brother doesn’t quite display the same kind of measured sensitivity towards themes that both define and transcend the human condition, but it nevertheless leaves the viewer enough elbow room to orientate themselves with regard to the material tackled in the movie. A trio of stories that superficially cut right through generational divides and overtly comment about widening rifts between cohorts—parents refusing to seek common ground with their now adult children or even physically leaving them to their own devices—nevertheless smuggles a more nuanced and multifactorial conversation within it and shows that the old maverick still has what it takes to add to the cultural conversation without coming across as out of touch or heavy-handed.

Sure, Jarmusch’s latest movies might end up seen as one of the minor entries in his catalogue but even if that’s the case, it must be recognized that in a filmography full of objectively incredible works it is still an achievement. Father Mother Sister Brother hides under its brooding epidermis the same kind of deadpan zest you ought to recognize as this director’s signature. It might be lower in energy than Night on Earth and therefore not as playful or engaging, but it still shows—equally through its characters, grasp of the visual language and carefully hidden profundity within otherwise simple-looking predicaments—that the man has a lot to say about the intricacies of the human condition and the complexities of our innate need to connect and bridge divides even in completely inhospitable environs; and he does so with his signature precision hybridizing his lifelong admiration of Yasujiro Ozu, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Bresson, Federico Fellini and many others.

Therefore, it is best to afford this movie the same breathing space that the movie gives the viewer and let it sit with you for hours, maybe even days, before forming an opinion of it. While I think it’s not on the same level as some of his best works, Father Mother Sister Brother is nonetheless a strong outing and a reminder that cinema can be simple and complex at the same time, and that it is up to the viewer to meet the movie where it is. Although I think that Jarmusch has already dispensed his most profound insights about life on this mortal coil in other works, this triptych of ballads about tension and connection festooned with his characteristic sense of humour—which is so profoundly camouflaged that it might be misinterpreted as pomposity by bad faith actors—still shows that this maverick of yore has enough bottle to move your soul.