Must Read After My Death

This is an odd film, constructed entirely of audio recordings and home movies. I walked in a few minutes late and missed the beginning, and then ended up leaving early. So take this for what it’s worth.

On the face of it, Must Read After My Death is 100% up my alley: family dysfunction, psychoanalysis, home movies – a trifecta of my top interests. The story, as far as I could make out (and later read): an upper-middle-class American family made hundreds of hours of recordings of its members’ inner lives, first as audio letters between Dad working in Australia and Mom and the kids back home in Connecticut, then as audio diaries made at the prompting of psychotherapists. The family, in a nutshell, is fucked up (in the Philip Larkin sense – I’m not using profanity gratuitously here): Mom and Dad have an open marriage, Dad tells mom in great detail about his “adventures,” Mom has the occasional fling of her own, Dad is obsessed with the kids keeping their rooms neat, and everyone slowly goes mad.

The film consists of these audio recordings, cut with the family’s home movies and photos, and home-movie stock footage – i.e. other people’s home movies. So there’s certainly lots here to make a disturbing and illuminating film. And yet… after 20 minutes of this, I felt like I’d seen enough. Maybe it was because I’d missed the set-up… but 20 minutes should be enough to catch up. Mostly, I think, it was because the film had a sameness to it. It didn’t feel like it was going anywhere, and it didn’t have any kind of reflective quality. With no context, nothing but these deeply disturbed voices from 40 years ago, the film, curiously, didn’t draw me in. The droning minimalist soundtrack didn’t help. It may be that the composer’s intent was to create discomfort; if so, he succeeded, but not to the benefit of the film. The experience of viewing Must Read After My Death felt voyeuristic without being illuminating. I was craving context, more information, a voice beyond the tapes. When I realized that this voice wasn’t coming, I was done.

Wild Blue Yonder

Sometimes you watch a film and wonder why nobody stopped the filmmaker from releasing it. Wild Blue Yonder is one of those films. It's stunning to me that a film this undisciplined and self-indulgent, with so little to say, has made it into any serious festival at all, much less IDFA, where it premiered, and now Hot Docs. There could be only one reason for this: director Celia Maysles is the daughter of the late David Maysles, and the only remotely interesting part of the film is her dispute with Uncle Albert, the revered octogenarian Albert Maysles, patron saint of cinema vérité filmmakers everywhere. The documentary community, like any other, has a prurient interest in films that air the dirty laundry of its icons.

David Maysles died in 1987, when Celia was seven years old, from a deadly combination of a powerful anti-depressant and an over-the-counter cold medication. Subsequently, there was a nasty lawsuit between David's widow and Albert over David's share of Maysles Films, the company the two brothers founded together. For 17 years, Celia says, no one ever talked to her about her dad. And so, at the age of 24, she decides she needs to try to deal with the emptiness, find out who her father was, and make a film about it. So she turns her camcorder on herself, and goes around talking to people about David. Her greatest desire is to see Blue Yonder, David's unfinished autobiographical film, and use it in her own film. But Albert, who owns the material, says that he's working on his autobiographical project and that he wants to use some of the footage himself. He flatly refuses to let Celia even look at it.

Meanwhile, Celia has long, rambling conversations with her mother, with a woman who was in Grey Gardens (one of the Maysles Brothers' triptych of masterpieces, which was released three years before Celia's birth), with Christo and Jeanne-Claude (the subjects of several of the Maysles' films), etc. Almost all of these conversations go on entirely too long and add nothing to the story. The scenes have no focus and no payoff. It seems the young Ms. Maysles didn't prepare for her filmmaking journey by studying what actually made her father's films work - most of these scenes don't even come close to having a "decisive moment." (The "climax" of one scene with the slightly batty Grey Gardens lady is Celia eating a cracker with cheese.)

Celia also videotapes her own therapy sessions, which provide no additional insight. She reveals in passing that she was hospitalized at 16 for either anorexia or depression. And in the biggest visual cliché in the film, she is shown submerging herself under water in a bathtub. This is on par with the average navel-gazing film-school project; it most certainly is not a festival film.

There is one unintentionally revealing moment: during one of her conversations with Albert, she asks him to take her camera and film her. And suddenly, the shot is beautiful, properly exposed, and somehow interesting. You see immediately what Albert means when he talks about the documentarian's gaze. It's as if the crafty old fox is saying, "Don't forget - whatever this young woman is going to say about me, I'm the real filmmaker here."

In the end, it's not like there isn't a real film to be made here. David Maysles was clearly a fascinating character with a wounded soul, and he left behind an amazing array of material, including audiotapes of his own psychoanalysis sessions. And the lawsuit between David's widow and Albert raises all kinds of interesting issues. David was married to Judy, but he also had a professional marriage with Albert. The dispute is like two widows of a bigamist fighting over who was the #1 wife and rightful heir.

A more mature and skilled filmmaker could have done a lot with this. It calls for a nuanced, carefully written essay film by an adult who is capable of parsing adult emotions and actions. But instead we are subjected to the confused musings of a young woman trying to heal herself - something she really should do in private. My prediction is that ten or fifteen years from now, Celia Maysles will be deeply embarrassed that she ever released this film.