How is the film that won Venice 82
There is a film, in Venice 82, which has noticed not so much for its beauty as for its surprising peculiarity. The protagonist is Cate Blanchett, together with Adam Driver and many other names of the big screen such as Tom Waits, Mayim Bialik, Charlotte Rampling, Vicky Krieps, Sarah Greene, Indya Moore, Luka Sabbat, Françoise Lebrun. And the plot? Well, it is impossible to tell because basically there is not.
The film in question is titled “Father Mother Sister Brother”, won the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival 2025, and was born from an idea of the American director Jim Jarmusch, indeed, from his desire to transmit moods and try to tell the oddities and at the same time the tenderness of family relationships.
“Father Mother Sister Brother” is an anthological film divided into three parts. Each of these has different protagonists and tells a different story set in three cities: there is Dublin, there is Paris and there is New Jersey. All the stories, however, are united by the theme of family and love told through scenes of daily life, without any narrative development.
This is a very unusual choice that of the American director who opts for the anthological genre which, at the cinema, could be not very engaging and it must be said that it is a bit what happens with this film, at least until you enter totally in its narrative scheme and appreciate it in all its “strangeness”.
In “Father Mother Sister Brother” we see two sisters with the opposite character take tea with their mom, we see two brothers drinking coffee at the bar while faceing a new daily life after the death of the parents and two children, now adults, go and find their elderly dad home. Nothing shocking from the point of view of content but what is striking of this film is its ability to transmit emotions without having to resort to narrative patterns, a development of history, twists and turns or other means.
Seeing Jim Jarmusch’s latest work is like assisting, on the big screen, in small extracts of his life and with his irony and apparent lightness this film manages to touch very deep ropes, perhaps much more than a work in which the plot has a beginning, a performance and an end.
We are not used to seeing feature films with such a particular structure and dialogues that might seem random and meaningless but we must take the time to take the measures with this film, appreciate its uniqueness and understand how emotionally strong it can be to see on the big screen simple and apparently insignificant stalli of everyday life.
After all, aren’t these moments that count most in life?
VOTE: 6.4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgpevr702fkundefined
