A documentary as fragmentary and irritating as reminiscence itself, Lynne Sachs’ “Film About a Father Who” is the second movie within the final yr wherein a nonfiction filmmaker has constructed an elusive take a look at her personal father. But the place the twists in Kirsten Johnson’s “Dick Johnson Is Dead” are playfully morbid, Sachs’ movie is darker and extra disconcerting; Johnson could entertain us by staging her father’s dying, however Sachs disturbs us by delving into her dad’s life.
The result’s one other difficult piece of labor from a filmmaker who has by no means been significantly excited by typical narrative. “This is not a portrait,” she says at one level within the movie. “This is not a self portrait. This is my reckoning with the conundrum of our asymmetry.”
“Film About a Father Who,” which opens in digital cinemas on Jan. 15 to coincide with a retrospective of Sachs’ work on the Museum of the Moving Image in New York, is in sure methods as thorny as that definition. And it’s additionally a conundrum itself — a movie that was clearly made with affection, however one from which the viewers is liable to stroll away with out a lot of its personal affection or sympathy for the central determine, Ira Sachs Sr.
At the start of the movie, he’s established as an enthralling, amusing determine: a “hippie businessman” who made work calls on an early cell phone from the ski slopes of Park City and lived by Nietzsche’s quote, “Don’t trust the flatlanders,” a person for whom each Thursday was “Bob Dylan Day,” and a giant spender who owned two Cadillac convertibles however painted them each the identical shade of pink so his mom wouldn’t assume he was unduly extravagant.
But that was simply his cute, colourful aspect. Beyond that, Ira Sachs seems to be a deeply egocentric man who, within the phrases of certainly one of his daughters, “had his own language, and we were expected to speak it.” He’s an inveterate philanderer who has 9 kids with 5 completely different ladies — a life-style despised by his mom, who says she will solely settle for him “as a child who’s handicapped.” And he’s a deeply scarred one that will not often if ever acknowledge his personal damage, or the damage he triggered others.
The particulars emerge piecemeal over the brisk 74-minute operating time, however they’re organized in a approach that feels purposefully disorganized. The narrative is stuffed with stops and begins, leaping round in time and format from 1965 to 2019. Cameras, typically as not, are within the body; a lot of this footage paperwork someone documenting Ira. (Lynne isn’t the one filmmaker within the household; Ira Sachs Jr. is a director who made “Love Is Strange” and “Frankie,” amongst others.) Eventually, all of it begins to jumble collectively and look the identical: Ira Sr. with younger ladies, with children, with completely different younger ladies and completely different children, and all the time with the identical grin on his face and, typically, with the identical refusal to reply questions.
“He’ll give you a truthful answer,” says certainly one of his kids at one level. “But you gotta ask the right questions, which you won’t.”
It begins to really feel repetitive because the movie turns right into a chronicle of Ira’s many girlfriends, with the household struggling to catalog all of them: “Then there have been the subsidiary girlfriends: Mitzi, and someone named Sunday or Monday or one thing … “
Late within the movie, the household, already confusingly massive, expands much more as Lynne Sachs introduces two extra kids that her father saved hidden for 20 years as a result of his mom had threatened to chop him out of her will if he had any extra children. Those kids, too, battle to return to phrases with their father, making the movie much less about Ira Sachs Sr. than concerning the household that may’t work out how they need to really feel about him.
But that confusion is essential to “Film About a Father Who,” which was named after Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s deeply ambivalent 1974 film “Film About a Woman Who … ” At one level within the movie, Lynne Sachs says that she’s been…
