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Rating: DESPITE EVERYTHING…
It’s not easy to fit into this “little film” a splendid Tom Waits, a simply perfect Cate Blanchett, a truly reborn Charlotte Rampling… and that’s precisely why Jarmusch performs something close to a miracle: he crafts a comedy out of delicious dialogues, with irony and sarcasm measured to perfection, but also plucking at the strings of the soul, opening the deepest chambers and taking you on a journey …
This is why “Father, Mother, Sister and Brother” is a “great film” disguised as a “little film”… the prize in Venice is absolutely well-deserved, a treat for both the eyes and the heart.
Because if you look beyond the “little stories,” seemingly banal, that define the three episodes, you might find questions that are anything but small: how much can you pretend and forget even who you are for the sake of someone you love?
Can you even let yourself appear to your children as a failure at sunset just to make them feel necessary in your life? Can you act the well-adjusted good girl or the “satisfied old maid” just to give your mother the certainty she did a good job? Can you even lay yourself bare in the deepest intimacy to share pain and overcome the guilt for having been absent?
Fragmented relationships, time stretched in human bonds, those years or who knows how long since the last encounter, are not enough to erase the certainty in the protagonists that it’s worth putting everything on the line, despite everything…
And then, the ingenious finesse with which Jarmusch ties these three stories together. Those beautiful cars, whether junk or jewels, speak of a yearning for the journey. Colors worn almost by chance that become a sign of identity and togetherness. The skateboards appearing here and there, like life flowing by, sometimes racing, but able to slow down—just as Jarmusch does in those scenes of kids (and not-so-kids-anymore) streaking through the streets. The windows, with those splendidly constructed shots to light up the scenes, windows that, whether from a mountain lake, a Dublin neighborhood, or a Paris penthouse, open onto life, onto the world, onto the light that, after all, embraces us all… despite everything…
But can you toast to life with water or tea? Of course you can, because in the end, who you are might mean nothing at all to the people you love… if you welcome those moments, those little things, those small gestures, those fleeting complicit glances as the very “juice” you are seeking…
And when you leave, you truly feel that humanity still has hope, despite everything…
VERY BEAUTIFUL: HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
(RECENSTALKER 20/12/2025)
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