Father Mother Sister Brother

Tropic Sprockets by Ian Brockway

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The auteur of 1980s underground cinema Jim Jarmusch is now a silver-haired Godfather of cyberspace, existential and fatalistic but not without joy and the possibilities of variety. His new film “Father Mother Sister Brother” is an impressionistic and quirky character study centering on 21st-century families, contrasting with a nostalgia for eccentricity, fierce individualism, and the past.

This pensive and colorful film is divided into three segments and bookended by short, expressionistic digital color fields reminiscent of the work of Stan Brakhage.

In the first chapter an anarchistic father (Tom Waits) still grieving his wife, welcomes his shy strait-laced adult children Jeff (Adam Driver) and Emily (Mayim Bialak). Their father is somewhat of a hoarder and a curmudgeon. The two don’t quite know how to act around him. He refuses a cell phone and modern conveniences and is known as a recluse in financial straits.

Emily observes a book by Noam Chomsky on the shelf. Much of the time is spent in silence.

When asking about his routine, Emily is shocked when the father grabs an ax and begins to simulate chopping wood, almost losing control.

After some understandable recovery from this scare and giving the father a box of groceries and gourmet pasta, Jeff notices a Rolex on his wrist. The father meekly insists that it is an imitation.

After giving father several hundred in hand, Jeff and Emily stiffly exit, as if from the company of a stranger.

Within moments, father is in sunglasses on the phone to his lover telling her that he has come into some money and wants to meet at their “usual.”

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In the next segment, Mother (Charlotte Rampling is icy and stentorian, arranging her daughters Lilith (Vicky Krieps ) and Timothea (Cate Blanchett) as if they are mannequins or set pieces in a drawing room play. Rampling is a genuine Snow Queen, intense, opaque, and scary.

Lillith runs to the bathroom and bursts into tears.

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In the last and perhaps most poignant of the three vignettes, a bohemian Skye (Indya Moore) visits her twin brother Billy (Luka Sabbat) in Paris after Covid. Over the past months their freethinking, scofflaw parents died in a plane crash, circumstances unspecified.

Over tiny cups of Parisian coffee, the twins come to a calm awakening that they still have each other in spite of life’s mercurial condition.

Surrealistically, Moore and Sabbat complement each other as if by means of the supernatural blending into perfect mirrors of the other, Tarot twins flung from space: one on a motorcycle and one in a car, both clad in skin of black leather.

Left with the last minutes of a blue and pink screen of abstract expressionism and the voice of Velvet Underground’s Nico, one pines for Lou Reed, liberty, graffiti, and the tangible grasp of all 1980 New York things, underscored by a Rolex and its three mystical appearances.

Jim Jarmusch’s neon jungle is full of quirk and circumstance yet again. His urban mental city compelling and color-coded, thrives on and happily so.

Write Ian at ianfree11@yahoo.com