“Brief History of a Family,” by Lin Jianjie
The ball appeared off-screen, hitting the high school student who was practicing on the high bar. He fell and injured himself. The starkness of the image, the intense sound, it was almost like a dream. When another student, Wei, accompanies Shuo to the infirmary and then invites him home, we guess that it was he who threw the ball, without knowing if it was intentional.
This is how the first film by Chinese director Lin Jianjie will unfold, in environments that are both stylized and very readable, in atmospheres where there is constant uncertainty not about what is happening, but about how to connect the actions of the four main protagonists, the two teenagers and Wei’s parents, who little by little completely welcome Shuo into their home.
Well-off, cultured, ambitious, “modern”, the parents are distressed by their son’s lack of taste for studies, without consideration for what interests the teenager (fencing). Each in their own way, the father and mother recognize in Shuo, a foreign body introduced into the unbalanced family unit, qualities that they would have so hoped for in their offspring.
Coming from a very poor family where violence and alcoholism reign, Shuo gradually builds his place in Wei’s family, who sees his status as a protective friend crumble and soon feels in a position of inferiority in his own home.
The success of Brief History of a Familyof which there is no reason why it should not be released under the title “Brief History of a Family”) is due to the clarity of the springs which animate each character, while retaining a troubled atmosphere, on the fringes of thriller and fantasy. An indirect portrait of an important part of today’s China, the one which benefited materially and culturally from the economic boom of the first twenty-five years of the century, the film tells of lifestyles, neighborhoods, “signs of life” where injustice also plays a large part.
In small, tense, falsely harmonious sequences, he unfolds a mystery which is not due to any secret, but to the insoluble strangeness of a state of reality where nothing can correspond to the representations that each and every person has of it.
There reside threats, sadness, sometimes comedy and sometimes violence, and often a disenchanted form of tenderness. On several occasions, shots filmed vertically, from very high, evoke a microscopic observation of cells, as we saw, in the form of a gag, at the beginning of the film – and the director’s training as a biochemist confirms the connection.
With a deliberately cold elegance, but which observes its protagonists with a form of compassion without claiming to have a solution or preaching, Lin Jianjie’s sophisticated, unaffected staging thus tells a lot without imposing anything.
Gently, it also questions spectators’ prejudices about family and social relationships, by playing on both dominant references to the organization of human relationships and the codes of the thriller, or even the horror film, while proposing possible reversals.
“Low heat”, by Sarah Friedland
The first feature film from the woman who was notably Kelly Reichardt’s assistant is curious in more than one way. Firstly because, against all likelihood, the hypothesis remains for a long time that it could be a documentary, while the camera accompanies Ruth, this elderly lady who welcomes into her beautiful house a visitor whom she does not recognize, but whom she likes.
The man takes the woman to what turns out to be a high-end nursing home, where he puts his mother, who no longer knows who he is. Obviously a fiction film, even if outside the United States the actress Kathleen Chalfant, best known for her theater roles, is hardly famous, On low heat (Familiar Touch) maintains throughout its duration a documentary content, which is due to the way of filming and the attention to details, even though the situations clearly belong to fiction.
The film is also curious because of its bias towards only highlighting moments and situations, if not all happy, at least able to be accompanied by the protagonists – caregivers, residents, relatives – in a caring and respectful manner. Even if it is clear that the pathologies from which people admitted to the institution suffer can have dramatic manifestations (for themselves and for others), the film makes clear the rule of the game, of its game: focus on the ways in which things can go well.
Which supposes, among other things, to be located in a pleasant setting, necessarily expensive, especially in the United States, where the violent inequality of the health system excludes the vast majority of the benefits of care as shown by Sarah Friedland.
In this case, it is useful to know that the young director (33 years old) herself worked in reception centers for elderly people who were losing their bearings. And that it is this experience, and all of the practices developed with caregivers and patients to invent responses to the multiple obstacles and difficulties encountered, which inspired the film project.
This is therefore at the meeting point of a realistic story (as to the materiality of gestures and certain situations) and a fable claiming the utopia of much better possible care than what occurs in most establishments.
Referring to what was Ruth’s professional activity before she showed symptoms of Alzheimer’s disease, cook (“not boss!”) having published books devoted to the flavors of life, the French title of the film (On low heat) also echoes the general tone of the production.
Due to a filmmaker who is also a choreographer, the staging translates the partially dreamlike, partially enchanted bias of a story through an orchestration of gestures, rhythms and shots, which generates a charm in unison with the grace emanating all together from the main actress and her character, as well as from her privileged interlocutor, caring with a sensitive and warm presence.
And it is by simmering this rapprochement between realism of observation and affirmation of other possibilities of living, of supporting and showing old age and the loss of capacities that accompany it, thatOn low heat composes this happy and stimulating reverie, about situations which are often far from being.
