‘Father Mother Sister Brother’ Jim Jarmusch Returns To His Arthouse Roots – Venice Film Festival

If Béla Tarr made Abigail’s Party if might look something like this, an elevated cringe comedy that marks a return, of sorts, to the kind of portmanteau movie Jim Jarmusch made in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The theme is very simple — family — but there are other overlaps too, with jokes that recur, like various iterations of the British phrase “Bob’s your uncle”, which clearly tickled Jarmusch somewhere on his travels. It’s slight for sure, and true to his word in Cannes 2023 it does make his last film, Paterson, look like a Jean Claude Van Damme action film, but it’s good to see that he’s moved away from his not very productive period spent fruitlessly trying to re-energize stale horror tropes.

True to form, Father Mother Sister Brother brings together an extraordinarily eclectic cast; some of them familiar faces from the Jarmusch cinematic universe, but, trust me, you won’t have seen them quite like this before. Split into three sections, interspersed with trippy light patterns and a plangent avant-garde guitar score by the director himself and frequent collaborator Annika Henderson, it looks at three family units in three time zones, moving slowly east from the nondescript nowheresvilles of north-east America, to Dublin then Paris.

Linked by Dusty Springfield’s slinky cover of “Spooky”, which has no apparent thematic relevance whatsoever, Jarmusch’s triptych opens with “Father”, which stars Adam Driver and Mayam Bialik as Jeff and Emily, two straitlaced siblings traveling upstate to see their father (Tom Waits). As evidenced by their conversation, Father is something of a conundrum to the pair of them (“How does Daddy survive, exactly?”), and they don’t seem especially close either. Inevitably, the meeting is a disaster, and Jarmusch keeps things dryly tantalizing, hinting at Father’s bohemian past with references to books by Reich and Chomsky, a very funny checklist of every drug under the sun, and, most baffling of all to Emily, what appears to be a genuine Rolex on the old man’s wrist.

The second story, “Mother”, is completely unrelated, this time reversing the dynamic with the effect that Mother (Charlotte Rampling) is a well-to-do and possibly rather racy novelist, whose two misfit daughters are coming to visit. Timothea (Cate Blanchett) is the practical but nerdy type whose car breaks down along the way; Lilith (Vicky Krieps) is the pink-haired dropout type, who forces her girlfriend to drop her off round the corner so that she can pretend that she can afford an Uber. As in the first episode, it seems like nobody really wants to be there, especially when the older woman pours the tea. “Shall I be mother?” says Mother. You might as well start sometime,” says Lilith.

The third part, Sister Brother, is by far the weakest, partly because it doesn’t share the heightened awkwardness of the previous two excerpts. This one stars Indya Moore as Skye and Luka Sabbat as Billy, two siblings dealing with their parents’ estate, but, disappointingly, there’s no side to their conversation, as there has been previously. It has precedent in Jarmusch’s low-key canon, like the intimate scenes with two Japanese tourists in Mystery Train, but it sticks out a little uncomfortably here, guiding the film to its oblique, see-yourself-out conclusion rather than providing a satisfying ending.

Whenever films like this pop up, there’s always a chorus of “BUT WHO’S IT FOR?”, a complaint that the director has likely been dealing with since his first brush with arthouse stardom over 40 years ago with Stranger Than Paradise. Indeed, compared to 2005’s Broken Flowers, this is a wilfully obscure step back to his deadpan, experimental roots, a gentle, almost deliberately un-film that is best not viewed in too much proximity to the witching hour. Nothing seems to land, but somehow it lingers; enjoy it or not, Father Mother Sister Brother will worm its way into your brain like false memory syndrome, a fitfully funny, if never laugh-out-loud reminder that you can’t choose your family.

Title: Father Mother Sister Brother
Festival: Venice (Competition)
Director/screenwriter: Jim Jarmusch
Cast: Tom Waits, Adam Driver, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Cate Blanchett, Vicky Krieps, Sarah Greene, Indya Moore, Luka Sabbat, Françoise Lebrun
Distributor: Mubi
Running time: 1 hr 50 mins

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