A FAMILY
Australia/Ukraine, 2018, 91 minutes, Colour.
Miksym Dernenyov, Larysa Hraminiska, Tatiana Kosianchuk, Pavol Lehenkyi, Liudmyla Zamidra,
Directed by Jayden Stevens.
The credits are a surprise. Two Australians, writer Jaden Stevens and Tom Swinburn, under the auspices of the Melbourne International Film Festival, have made this existential drama, filming in Kiev, with local actors, speaking local language.
Existential is important. And, while audiences are trying to appreciate the characters and the situations, highly contrived, a final character notes that “life is a maze”. And, the nature of a maze is that those who enter become trapped.
The central character is, indeed, trapped. He lives alone, solitary life in a very mundane house, with some glimpses outside to a rather drab lane and surroundings. The credits call him Emerson. He interviews a young woman with strange questions. A middle-aged couple turn up at his house. Later he interviews another man away from his house. The characters arrive, they have set lines, they recite them, he urges them to recite them with more energy and realism, he films them. They are his created family.
Emerson gets out of his loneliness by contriving home situations, getting the actors to perform them (and, by and large, they get into their roles). It is hard to know what satisfaction Emerson gets out of this filming as he is so inexpressive. When the young woman who works at a diner that Emerson frequents fails to turn up, the actors demand their pay, Emerson refusing saying that they get money only when the performance starts – there is a revolution.
The second part of the film has Emerson tracking down the young woman, going to her house, encountering her widowed mother who takes quite a shine to Emerson. In fact, he sets up house with the two women as if he were a husband and father. No filming this time but enacting family situations – and the mother certainly entering into the spirit of the performance especially the sexual relationship. There is a dance sequence with the young woman who imagines she has some talent. Finally, her boyfriend turns up and makes the comment about the maze.
This is very plain filming, the visual equivalent of the literary term, prosaic. Plain setups, some extreme close-ups at times, plain framing, almost unsaturated colour, the audience observers of this eccentric behaviour.
A film for arthouse audiences – and a commentator noting that its screening would be without any risk of financial success! A curiosity item, plainness stylised.
