Sometimes, filmmaking – storytelling overall – is about the void. Sometimes, it’s about what you don’t see, or hear, or have explained. Deployed well, the void can actually fill your psychic space, can rip away all distractions to let you see the real. The danger for a storyteller is that sometimes the void just becomes a void.
At the beginning of Family Portrait — which is now available on Metrograph at Home — an affluent, extended, yes, family gathers in the woods of their expansive property to shoot a Christmas card photo. It is a beautiful, presumably late-summer day, and they are all in high spirits, so much so that one member, Katy (Deragh Campbell) struggles desperately to corral them into formation. In an exquisitely choreographed sequence, co-writer/director Lucy Kerr captures the familial version of Xeno’s Paradox: Katy endeavors to get everyone in position, but the closer the swirl of parents, adult children, and younger grandchildren get to the event at hand, the more impossible it seems that the photo will ever be taken.
The film then flashes back to earlier in the morning, as we see the family members interact around Katy’s parents’ home. The mother lays out her hyper-detailed plans for the photo; the father reminisces on the events surrounding a WWII photo of his own father (and mis-attributes the film They Live in the process); Katy’s boyfriend and reluctant photographer Olek (Chris Galust) waits anxiously for a breakfast that, like the photograph, seems never to arrive. It’s all idle chat and activity, but it doesn’t take long for a streak of darkness to insinuate itself. Katy reads Olek a passage about a woman haunted by the childhood memory of her mother’s disembodied eyes; two children toy with the corpse of a small creature; news arrives of the death of a distant relative. And then the mother disappears, and only Katy is aware of the absence.
Kerr strives to capture the sense of something missing within the heart of all the banality. At times, she maybe does too well. Not enough gets filled in of these dozen some-odd characters; it’s occasionally difficult to distinguish one family member from another, particularly Katy’s sisters (or at least I think they’re her sisters, one or more may be sisters-in-law). There may be a valid point to a narrative this amorphous – it does give us an unsettling glimpse of a family merged into an indistinguishable whole. It’s effective, but I was left wishing there was more to hold onto.
I get the sense that Family Portrait is deeply personal for Kerr. There’s a yearning for attachment there, one that she may or may not have been able to achieve in real life. As Katy’s search for her missing mom becomes more desperate, the rest of her family becomes more removed, to the point where by the end Katy herself has literally slipped out of their reality – no wonder she has problems rallying them to the photo location. At one time or another, all of us have experienced that moment when you feel separated from a place you sense you should belong. Family Portrait captures that feeling, and does it with grace and heartache.