Review: An Almost Perfect Family
- Wildly slaloming between being overly personal and not exactly convincing, Tudor Platon’s documentary still succeeds in conveying the feeling of permanent loss
One of the several world premieres at the 31st Astra Film Festival, Romanian director Tudor Platon’s sophomore documentary feature, An Almost Perfect Family, stands as proof – together with Radu Ciorniciuc and Lina Vdovîi's Tata [+see also:
film review
interview: Lina Vdovîi, Radu Ciorniciuc
film profile], which opened the gathering on Sunday, and Isabela Tent’s Alice On & Off [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Isabela Tent
film profile], which won three accolades, including the FIPRESCI Award, at this year’s Transilvania Film Festival – that one of the main themes explored this year in Romanian documentary cinema is the idea of family. Or, more precisely, the idea of how one generation’s issues seep into and contaminate the next generation. It is not at all surprising that Astra offers its audience a thematic sidebar called “Family Portrait”, which, in Platon’s case, is actually a self-portrait, as the young director turns the camera on himself, his partner (also the film’s producer, Carla Fotea) and his parents.
At first, Platon seems to be using the same framing device he used in his first directorial effort, House of Dolls [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile], where we meet several seventy-something women, including the director’s grandmother, during a week-long holiday in the summer. This time, it all begins over the Christmas holidays, when the Platon family spends a week in a mountain cabin. Both the director’s mother and father are around, but we soon find out that they have issues, and as his own relationship gets more serious, the director tries to find out what made his parents stop fighting for their bond.
In this reviewer’s opinion, as soon as one points a camera at a person, that person inevitably changes, offering back to the camera something other than their reality. Let’s simply call it their augmented, self-conscious reality, one that is contaminated by expectations (what does my audience expect from me?) and the totally understandable desire to look more interesting or more appealing to others. Even if the director seems to be turning the camera on and to be recording until his protagonists forget about it, the entire set-up puts a strain on the conversations, and at times, they feel contrived and artificial.
Indeed, An Almost Perfect Family succeeds in exploring the generation gap and how differently Romanian youngsters behave when compared to their parents. Sometimes, a true pearl of wisdom is uttered (“Even the stupidest man can teach one a good lesson just by being a bad example”). And the documentary succeeds in conveying the ambiguity of sorrow and dissatisfaction, that haunting mixture of inaction and complacency that can doom a relationship forever. We feel, as spectators, the fear of that precise moment when a split becomes definitive and, simultaneously, a certain hope that the continuous entropy of the forces in a relationship will remain fluid, preventing the director and his partner from ending up like the former’s parents.
The strength of House of Dolls resided in its protagonists’ gusto and talent as communicators, but unfortunately, things are quite different in this new documentary. Both parents are far less proficient in describing their truths and feelings, or perhaps they are just not interesting enough. Ultimately, this makes the film look like it consists of second-best shots, the best being, hopefully, the protagonists’ own lives as themselves and not as their on-screen personas.
An Almost Perfect Family also suffers because of at least two exceedingly personal moments (a marriage proposal and an outburst of post-partum depression) that the audience might feel they shouldn’t have witnessed. Perhaps the director should look outside the family for his next documentary project, as An Almost Perfect Family ultimately feels less than almost perfect.
The documentary was produced by Romanian outfits microFilm and Miricordo.
