It was a delight to end my 2025 film year by watching Jim Jarmusch‘s film ‘Father Mother Sister Brother‘. This is another of the triptychs that the American director wrote and brought to the screen, in which three cinematic stories are linked together by various thematic and aesthetic elements – some more visible, others more subtle, requiring attention and sensitivity from the viewers. In the case of the film awarded the ‘Golden Lion in Venice this year, the theme is families and the relationships between children who have already reached adulthood and parents who are advancing in age and moving away from their children. It is not necessarily about unhappy families, each in its own way, as Tolstoy defined them, but about families in which parents and children, despite appearances and good intentions, are no longer together or perhaps have never been together.
In the first segment, Jeff and Emily visit their lonely father, who lives in a remote, mountainous area of the United States. The father seems to lead a rather precarious existence, the son helps him, the daughter seems more indifferent, but small secrets and untruths seem to camouflage the father’s situation and distort the relationships between him and his children. In the second story, the heroine is the mother, a successful Irish writer who invites her daughters to tea and cookies once a year. The daughters are the ones who hide secrets here, but the mother seems to understand a lot behind the wall of little lies and silences. In the third story, which takes place in Paris, the parents are no more. The heroes are brother and sister, twins, who make a last visit to the apartment of their parents, a couple of expatriate Americans, who recently perished in a small plane crash. The empty space they left behind, a warehouse space full with things evacuated from the apartment and an envelope with documents (some fake!) and photographs are the testimonies of a life marked by secrets and unspoken things between parents and children.
The script, also written by Jarmusch, subtly describes the dramas behind the ordinary. Family relationships seem normative, but behind the conventions each character and especially the parents seem to hide a lot. To what extent do we know our parents? How do we deal with their aging, which is for all the prelude to our aging? The questions are asked, the answers remain to be given by each of the spectators. The stories are apparently simple, even banal, but the connections between them are subtle and form a scaffolding made of reused common elements: the heroes recite toasts without alcohol, an archaic English expression (‘and Bob’s your uncle’) is repeated by various characters, Tissot watches – perhaps authentic, perhaps fake – appear on the characters’ wrists and skateboarders traverse the roads and streets of America, Dublin or Paris. Behind the apparent banality hide the secrets and complexity of each of the characters. The formidable team of actors includes Tom Waits, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett (who seems to live a new reincarnation with each new role) and Adam Driver. I don’t know if ‘Father Mother Sister Brother‘ was really the best film that was screened at the Venice festival this year, but I am convinced that Jim Jarmusch deserves at least one such major award at one of the world’s great festivals. If this came here and now, good that it came.