I've been thinking about what to write about Daddy Tran: A Life in 3D, because it's an interesting case study in the family-film subgenre.
Daddy Tran - cinematographer John Tran's father, Hai - is a character: a diminutive Vietnamese immigrant with a list of obsessions the length of your arm, the biggest of which is photography. He was a professional photographer in North Vietnam, until the post-Vietnam-War situation became untenable and he fled with his wife and three young children, in a leaky boat, through pirate-infested waters. The family eventually settled in Calgary, where Daddy Tran worked in a photo lab and spent every available cent on used cameras, to the consternation of his long-suffering wife. Eventually, he opened a used-camera store, which was a local institution until it closed last year, a victim of the digital revolution. Now retired, Tran spends all his time taking 3D photographs - an odd format that is hard to convey in film. And he haunts his children - including John, the cinematographer, who clearly made the film (with his wife, producer-director Siu Ta), not just as a tribute to a patriarch but as an attempt to come to terms with a difficult man.
The tone of the film is lighthearted - it's a lovely tribute to a man who sacrificed a lot for his family and built a good life in difficult circumstances. But it mainly skims the emotional surface until family members start to talk about Daddy Tran's fears and obsessions (the multiple locks on all the doors in the house, the need to show off his wealth), and his explosive temper. It turns out that everyone is afraid of Hai's moods and caters to his demanding behaviour. This is where the film cries out for a response from Daddy Tran himself... but it doesn't come. It feels like it took all the courage the filmmakers had to even broach the subject in the film. And it's true - I asked John about this; he said he and Siu were too afraid to bring it up with him.
But apparently something really interesting happened after Daddy Tran saw the film (at its Hot Docs premiere): he started talking more to his family about his life, his fears and his temper. Turns out, he may be open to dialogue and change after all. I'd love to see another chapter to this film - Hai Tran a year later, more reflective about his life, his family and his emotions, and dealing with the need to slow down. In Daddy Tran, he never stops moving or talking, as if he can't bear to stop and reflect. I'd like to see what comes out when he's ready.
Parent films are emotionally difficult to make. You have to be ready for anything the parent throws at you and ready to face the consequences (see Mark Wexler in Tell Them Who You Are). With a difficult parent, that's a daunting task. It only seems worth the risk if the filmmaker believes that something good will come out of the process - something more than just a watchable film.
For the Trans, good things are happening, now that the film is finished. But I wish these things were in the film.
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.
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.
Yesterday morning I got an e-mail from a friend suggesting strongly that I go see Life. Support. Music., a film that hadn't been on my radar. She had loved Eric Daniel Metzgar's previous film, she said, which played at Hot Docs in 2006, and this new one sounded amazing.
My friend is discerning and thoughtful. But it was the description in the Hot Docs program that sealed the deal: a film about a guitarist who almost dies from a brain hemorrhage, and his family's herculean efforts to bring him back to health. So off I went.
Life. Support. Music. establishes its storytelling language right away: a bit of pre-bleed footage of Jason Crigler, and then multiple voices telling the story of the fateful night and the immediate aftermath. The voices are mostly of Jason's family - wife, parents, sister - and the four of them appear on screen at the same time, in small frames lined up in a row. This is a film made for the big screen. We understand that the four of them are going to be the ones telling the story; Jason appears in a montage of photographs, from childhood through adolescence, adulthood, marriage, and impending fatherhood. All of that is in the pre-title sequence. It's a remarkable few minutes - inventive and engrossing, establishing Jason's character visually, without anyone having to say "Jason is..."
Like The Betrayal, this is not a cinema vérité film - Metzgar clearly hasn't been a fly on the wall throughout the whole process. But he makes a virtue of necessity, using Jason's sister's diary entries to move quickly through time, and then the family's home videos and footage shot for training purposes by the rehab hospital.
Indeed, it's the hospital video that provides the most shocking moment of the film: the first time we see Jason post-bleed, he is emaciated, limbs twisted, unable to close his mouth or move his eyes. It's hard to fathom that this is the same person we saw earlier. The rest of the film is a journey from this... to... we have no idea where it will end up.
The heart of the film is the interviews with the four family members who take care of Jason and through sheer determination slowly bring him back into consciousness. Gradually, we see him come back, start playing guitar again, and finally ease himself back into the music community that had been his professional and spiritual home before the illness. If there's ever a film that can be said to be a testament to the power of love, this is it.
The film's end credits are unusually short: Metzgar produced, directed, photographed, wrote and edited the film himself. This is not entirely unusual in the U.S. documentary-funding environment, but I've rarely seen someone perform all these roles at the same time on such a high level. I'm usually mistrustful of this kind of filmmaking. To me, one of the great things about making films is the collaborative aspect, and I think that having an outside perspective in the course of the process can often save the filmmaker from him- or herself. But in this case, there is hardly a misstep throughout. The film is visually rigorous, highly emotional and almost never goes off track or lapses into self-indulgence. There is one exception: towards the end, there is a musical montage of shots taken from various earlier scenes. Despite the strong music, the visuals have a sentimental, TV-sitcom feel.
But that's a very small quibble. This is not just a great story; it's really smart filmmaking.
Once in a while a film comes along that leaves me feeling deeply humbled, as a filmmaker and as a human. The Betrayal is one such film. I knew I had to see it because of its amazing history - it was made over the course of 23 (!!!) years by the acclaimed cinematographer Ellen Kuras, in close collaboration with its main subject, Thavisouk Phrasavath, who ended up as her co-writer and editor. But what I saw on screen was way beyond my expectations. I can think of few films that bring together this degree of creative vision, thoughtful application of craft, and commitment. And it moves me enormously that the relationship between documentarian and subject, which is always potentially problematic(*), turned gradually into one of close collaborators.
It's clear from the opening minutes that we're being taken on a journey. The film opens with shots of boys fishing on the Mekong River, and a myth - a Laotian prediction about the end of the world. We meet Thavi, speaking in the present, and his mother, interviewed in her kitchen, and we are soon immersed in the story of their family. The father, a soldier who worked with the Americans against Vietnamese and Lao Communist forces, is arrested shortly after U.S. forces leave and the Communist Pathet Lao regime takes over. Twelve-year-old Thavi swims across the Mekong River into Thailand, and waits for two years for his family to escape. Eventually, most of the family joins him and they make their way to the United States, where their hardships hardly diminish.
Cinema vérité would have been the easy, default approach to this film. It's certainly worked well in everything from Grey Gardens to Hoop Dreams. But Kuras goes in a totally different direction. Her approach is to focus on the subjects' internal journey, and on the way their memories inform and intersect with present-day reality. The past is represented partly with beautifully composed impressionistic shots filmed by Kuras herself, and partly with shots culled from Vietnamese propaganda films, which she and Phrasavath found in a Laotian archive, projected on a wall, and shot on 16mm film. (This is how documentary filmmaking often goes: a combination of careful planning and absolutely unexpected serendipity.) All this is combined with Thavi's poetic narration, which often has an epic quality, and revealing interviews with him and his mom.
After the film's screening at Hot Docs, Kuras talked about her desire to use dramatic elements but avoid having them look like docudrama (a very different approach from Air India 182, which is all about docudrama). One of her challenges, she said, was to shoot from her subject's point of view and then find a way to bring that person into the scene in an organic way, without having it look like docudrama. Whatever she did, it worked beautifully. I left feeling that I could learn more about filmmaking from The Betrayal than from any other film I'm likely to see at Hot Docs this year. This is a film I want to watch over and over.
(*) As explored in Jennifer Baichwal's The True Meaning of Pictures, which I also saw yesterday and hope to write about soon.
