(June 2021) – By Jada Sirkin
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"The Father" is a 2020 film directed by Florian Zeller and based on an internationally acclaimed play written by himself. Nearly everything takes place in an apartment and the central character is Anthony (Hopkins), an elderly man who has memory problems. In order to narrate (imply) his memory labyrinths, the film constructs a meticulous editing device: scenes suddenly transform into something else and what we thought was happening is revealed as a delusion, a mixed-up memory or a confused reverie. The mechanism keeps finding variations and the film is like a labyrinth that leads us, with Anthony, to the final scene —after so much struggle, if only for a few moments, the man surrenders to his fragility. It is possible that, as the nurse says, this same situation is repeated every day —the narrative, however, chooses to leave it for the end. Thus it achieves its effect. In my personal experience, the device achieved the effect —I attained a specific way of perceiving and, at times, I got lost with the confused Anthony. Something about it all moved me. It made me think of my grandfather, who in his later years also entered the labyrinth and had light blue, watery eyes like Anthony's.
The final scene touched me: already in the nursing home, refusing to understand that his daughter Anne (Olivia Colman) left him in London and moved to Paris, refusing also to accept (remember) that his other daughter died in an accident, now cornered between a closed door and a nurse he doesn't like, Anthony gives up and asks for his "mommy"; his shoulders rise, his body becomes child-like, he cries; the nurse soothes him and the camera pans off into the trees. I think those were the best moments, the simplest ones, like when he sits down for breakfast with Anne —when the narrative device quiets down and the scene is allowed to last a little longer before reaching the next jump of realities; then, we are given time to savor the subtlety of those bodies in that situation that, just by allowing itself to be simple, contains a lot of complexity.
As much as the narrative device achieved its effect, I must say that it also annoyed me. When in the first few minutes of the movie the jumps in time/remembrance are repeated a couple of times, we already understand that it's going to go that way —after that point, I was already waiting for the next trick. Maybe what bothered me was thinking that I had walked into an illusionism show. On the whole, the film seemed to me to be very much caught up in its own show —in its own theatrical trickery. Again, yes, the tricks achieved their effect, but I wonder what would happen if they weren't there. Since asking an experience to be different is futile, I don't ask the film to be something else; but the truth is that I couldn't do that either: I couldn't ask it to be something else, because, to ask it to be something else, the film would first have to be a thing —a defined thing. And the film is, to a large extent, what each I-viewer does with it —more or less consciously.
Taking advantage of that certain freedom to which every viewer is entitled, I play with picturing what this film would be like without the narrative device that, it seems, tries to make us feel what the character feels. Just as it happens when we lose something and we value it in a different way, picturing what the experience would be like without the narrative device implies at the same time recognizing what it is like with the device. This particular narrative device aims to make the viewer perceive as Anthony does —that is our reader's hypothesis. If the narrative seeks to make us feel what he feels in his moments of confusion, the question is, does it succeed? On one level, we can say yes; but, if we say yes, we have to admit that what the narrative succeeds in doing is to make us feel not what he feels, but an idea (or simplification) of what he feels, or might be feeling —Anthony or, by extension, a person with his condition.
In order to make us perceive what an elderly person with memory labyrinths perceives, the narrative has to simplify that experience —without simplifying, it could not organize the device responsible for making us understand/feel that experience. Paradox of storytelling: in order to talk about something, it has to make that something cease to be what it is and become a simplified (communicable) version of that something. Then, what every story tells is not what it tells but an idea about what it tells. In order to talk about something, the narrative is placed above that something. To bring us closer to an experience, it takes us away from it. I'm not saying that this is right or wrong, it's what we do all the time: to narrate is to map the experience and the map is always simpler than the territory. Every map, in order to bring closer, pushes away. If we need maps to survive (we need to get to food), the question might be to what extent (or in what way) we need them to play and create. If narrating (simplifying, mapping, storytelling) is inevitable, how do we use that technology? If we cannot live without fiction, how do we use fiction?
What I am saying is that it is very easy to leave this movie believing that we could feel —that we succeeded in feeling— what a person with memory labyrinths feels. What I'm saying is that what we felt (what we accomplished feeling) with the film was more the effect of a narratively organized idea. Again, that's not bad. It is very likely that most viewers of this film are not people with Anthony's condition and perhaps thanks to the film they may have some notion of what it is like to live with that condition —we all live, to a large extent, within the intricate labyrinths (complicated maps) of our memory; but let's just say that, in Anthony's case, the lines connecting the dots on his map seem to be rather short-circuited. The corridors of the apartment no longer lead him where he would like to be able to keep going. There is information that he no longer has the capacity to access, as if he has been left spinning in a kind of identity loop: there are two deaths that his system does not tolerate: the death of no longer living in his apartment and the death of his daughter in that barely mentioned accident. Although he already lives with his daughter Anne, and then he is taken to the nursing home, Anthony still needs to believe that he lives in his apartment. My apartment, he keeps saying. The only nurse he likes is one who, as he also says several times, reminds him of his daughter Lucy, the dead one. Not that the film explains it, but one might wonder if it is not the very denial of his daughter's death (the inability to integrate that information) that has unfolded that labyrinth of memories in his consciousness.
Hypothesis: perhaps this labyrinth of confused memories is nothing more than the short circuit created in his mind in an attempt to escape the pain of having lost his daughter. Forgetting (like anesthesia) is a trick widely used by human beings. And how can we judge it, if everyone does what he or she can. There is grief that never gets done —and no one says it should be done. Sometimes the monster is so sensitive that we need to protect it by building a labyrinth around it. We do what we can! If at all we can organize narratives to share some perceptions, there are very deep experiences that can only remain stored, inaccessible, in the abyss of sensitivity. Storytelling is a way to process experiences, but there are experiences that cannot be processed; then storytelling also becomes a way to escape from experiences: we narrate to assume, but we also narrate to generate a short circuit, to try not to feel —nevertheless, destiny manages to give us, even if it is in small drops, those doses of reality that make us stop the theater and, however brief the moment, just feel. Perhaps it is impossible for us, the viewers (supposedly healthier or less looped than Anthony) to feel and perceive as much as he feels and perceives —the storytelling, the labyrinth, may bring us a little closer: the point, again, is that the only thing the story can bring us closer to is an idea.
Note: with the above, I do not pretend to define what all the people who saw this film felt; I am just playing with some ideas, I do not pretend to simplify (narrate) the idea of what all the viewers of this material are supposed to experience. As we said before, each viewer, although conditioned by the proposal of the work and by his or her own cultural competence, has some freedom to process the material in his or her own way.
At some level, although I do not know if that was the conscious intention of the creators, I do perceive the intention, at least on the part of the narrative apparatus, to generate in me, as a viewer, the effect mentioned before —we can call it identification or empathy: to feel what Anthony feels when the short circuits happen. Although I trust the film's good intentions, I somehow think (and by believing it, I feel it) that what I am getting is a magic trick —more than magic, illusionism. I'm being tricked, I think, and then I feel tricked. But, well, what do I want? Isn't all storytelling a kind of illusionist trick? If I think of myself the viewer as a set of viewers (in the sense that, within me, there are different parts that react in different ways to the same thing), I would say that one of my viewers accepts the conjurer's game, and is even amused and moved by its effects; I would also say, however, that there is another viewer who makes a scene —that one does not like the tricks.
The thing about the illusionistic device is that it directs attention in a very specific direction, and therefore greatly reduces the possibilities of perceiving subtlety. No one says that the idea of the film (or its creators) was to show subtlety; in any case, subtlety always survives our intentions —complexity always survives simplification; and the way complexity survives the desertification created by simplification is by nothing more or less than including it. In this case, I think the subtlest moments are those in which the effects machinery takes a (brief) break and leaves some space for the bodies to live and vibrate without the corset of narrative intention. The final scene, the breakfast, a few moments with the new nurse who comes to care for Anthony at the house, his circus comedy, the sudden changes in mood —although one of my viewers celebrates those small moments where the acting can unfold (the delight of the shaking, the footsteps, the electricity and timing of a body that enjoys acting so much), another viewer protests that he would have liked, having Anthony Hopkins and Olivia Colman available, more of that vital minutiae that the scenes indulge in when they are not so constrained by the clever ideas of narrative spectacle.
To narrate (to tell a story) is to try and, above all, to succeed in transmitting a series of ideas. In general, the ideas that we try to convey in a story are ones that, properly intertwined, produce an effect of emotional order. The labyrinth is designed so that the viewer can reach the center. Now, believing that what is important are those ideas (and those emotions and that final center of meaning) takes us to high levels of control (see, in addition to the script, the hyper-careful lighting and the color blue): if the important thing about the experience is to achieve an effect, we need to control every detail of the mechanism so that it does not fail —because if that precise effect fails, we think we have nothing. It is true that this film is the way it is, and that if it exists it is because it has to exist, the way it is, to make sense and generate its effects —the calculated ones, important, and the uncalculated ones, inevitable. It is true that this clockwork mechanism is what in this case generates the context for Anthony (Anthony) to deploy his magic —not his illusionist tricks, but his magic. The question is whether Anthony's magic needs such context. The illusionist trick hides the real magic —and, by real, we mean more subtle and more complex. It's not that the illusion is false, it's just less complex and subtle than reality.
Reality is so complex that it is perhaps unexpressible. I guess that's why we tell stories —to give meaning to the unfathomable. The question is how much importance we place on stories and how much we allow ourselves to recognize what lies beneath the maps. At the end of his speech at an awards show, Brad Pitt said something like "let's keep telling stories." It seemed to me that he said it with a certain motivational pride. It caught my attention. I wondered why we place so much value on stories. And I still wonder. It's not a complaint or an unsatisfied viewer's grumble, it just amuses me to think how much more vital and explosive and profound it could be if we put Anthony and Olivia on improv. The point is this: improvisation is dangerous and doesn't guarantee us good results. It can be boring and difficult to assemble. It can even result in a material more simplistic than the most simplistic of choreographies. But, above all, improvisation can turn depth into too elliptical and scattered an effect, it can make the transcendent too confused with the banal. And the truth is that we love stories, because stories guarantee us important —final— results. We want to say important things. We exchange vitality for meaning. When we leave the cinema, we like to agree that "the photography was very good."
