You don’t have to be addicted to director Jim Jarmusch’s always going against the grain to recognize in him a true creatora filmmaker who is inventing the ground as he walks on it and a guy who was born modern and will die even more modern. … Since his early, sinister films, such as “Strangers in Paradise” or “Under the Law” (or the absurd and brilliant short film “Coffee and Cigarettes”), or that novel and romantic spectacle called “Mystery Train”, Jarmusch has explored his narrative, comedic, dramatic and sentimental possibilities to distance his viewers from the concepts of boredom, routine, repetition and make them interesting and attractive.
In his big film before the one he is releasing now, “Paterson”, Jarmusch also built poetry and emotional tension with his usual toneless and routine procedures: he showed himself as an accomplished filmmaker, veteran, modern, provocative and sentimental. In ‘Father Mother Sister Brother‘ takes a further step towards somewhere, perhaps towards the side of the man who already knows the interiors of the human being like a monkey his tree and who can touch the most sensitive keys to make them obvious while remaining enormously subtle. These are three stories, three separate pieces that speak (not very loudly, softly, there in the background and without fail) of this complex sentimental web between fathers, mothers, children, brothers, something that, to a greater or lesser extent, we all are and that we have all felt or, even more, evaded by realizing that we have felt it.
The first of the plots, the most explosive, tells of the journey of two brothers to the house of their forgotten father, who awaits them there, full of trials and evils, in his remote and dilapidated place in the middle of a beautiful and lonely forest. A well-crafted ax blow that reveals the bitter bitterness, the necessary annoyance in this encounter that they have and that everyone wishes they had already had. Beautifully played by the gruff Tom is waiting and for Adam Pilote And Maïm Bialik (Amy Farrah, Sheldon Cooper’s girlfriend on “The Big Bang Theory”) and the way she turns the dramatic ice of situations and relationships into vitalistic, humorous play is what we might consider Jarmusch’s brand of entertaining and intriguing with an air of monotony.
In the second, she changes temperature and location and hosts her characters in Dublin, an elegant and perfect mother waiting for her two not-so-perfect and elegant daughters to celebrate their annual get-together and have tea and pastries in the cold of conversation. Apparently boring, obviously without dramatic peaks, chatting eloquently between the silences, glances and thoughts of these untouchable worlds in which they live. Sensations that we find in the three excellent actresses on stage, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett And Vicky Krieps.
And the third, more eventful, in Paris and with two brothers, singular and twins, facing the supreme trance of emptying and closing the house of their deceased parents, this epiphany which reveals bitterness and happy memories and awakens the sensation of this terrible verb (almost always) of inheriting the much, the little, the good, the bad…
Three stories disconnected from each other, but which Jarmusch connects with the subtlety of certain phrases and certain situations, and with the idea that one must look inside their shell to see how much they have in common with each other and with anyone. The feelings spread with the wisdom of an old man, but very current and very sensitive. This is what the very modern Jarmusch is going for, who shows, although not openly, his sensitivity.
About The Author
