[Disclaimer: I know the filmmaker, Don Palathara, on Facebook and wrote this review following a note from him.]
I find it a little uncomfortable to refrain from giving “spoilers” when writing about a film like Don Palathara’s Family, to leave out — as most reviews of the film no doubt will — the single important piece of character detail around which it turns. Primarily because the film doesn’t treat this information as a spectacular reveal in the first place, giving it to us right at the 20-minute mark, without fuss or fireworks. Secondly because treating this information like some twisted secret to be discovered for kicks feels plain wrong, given the film’s subject matter. Even so, since Family has just premiered at the IFFR, I will write my review around this detail, although it should be amply clear for any imaginative reader what I’m talking about.
Set in a wooded village in Idukki, Kerala, Don’s sixth feature centres on Sony, a kindly young man who is the beating heart of his small Christian community. He helps out women with their household chores, he gives free lessons to struggling schoolchildren and he lends a hand in rescuing a cow trapped in a pit meant for a leopard menacing the village. When an outcast family is struck by tragedy, he intervenes with the Church to rehabilitate them. Everybody loves Sony, and they just can’t seem to do without him. There is, however, more to this sympathetic man than what meets the public eye.
Within the village, Sony appears to be everywhere at once and nowhere in particular. Completely anomalous yet strangely invisible. On the one hand, he behaves like a pastor who exerts great influence over his parish, worried about getting every lost sheep back into the fold: teenagers who are experiencing the pangs of adolescence, youth unsure about their careers, old men lamenting their plight. Like a pastoral prophet, Sony seems to be miraculously present wherever and whenever help is needed. He steers clear of the pervasive alcoholism that plagues the community, appears to defy its strict gender segregation, and shares none of its mistrust of cities and outsiders. In his easy mobility across public and intimate domestic spaces, he seems to be a rank exception.
Yet, in his self-effacing demeanour, in his laconism, in his unremarkable appearance and posture, Sony manages to dissolve into his surroundings. Don often films him deep in space, lost in the crowds and the setting, such that it becomes hard to work out where he is in the frame. Vinay Forrt — who plays Sony brilliantly and in good faith, without trying to tell us what we should think of him — has a touch of feline grace that greatly helps the animal metaphor the film sets up. In a terrific single-shot funeral sequence, timed like a ballet, he tiptoes out of a crowd of men in the background, vanishes behind a house, re-emerges in the foreground and exits right. With extraordinary economy, the scene conveys Sony’s capacity to appear and disappear without anyone noticing, even the viewer.
But Family is as much about the village as about Sony himself. With evident familiarity, the filmmaker presents the habits, rituals and mores of this self-enclosed community under the sway of Catholicism. He does not elucidate the exact relationship between the film’s two dozen characters — everyone is aunty/uncle, brother/sister, grandpa/grandma to everyone else — which gives the impression of the village being one big family united by the Church. Abounding in scenes in which two characters talk about a third person, Family plays particular attention to the way knowledge is produced and circulated within this hierarchical community. Secrets become public knowledge and public knowledge becomes secret as soon as it runs contrary to the prevailing order. A powerful dissolve late in the film takes us from the image of Sony walking with a boy over a hill to an influential nun arriving at the village; it’s that no information escapes the eyes of the Church, if not God.
“God is watching every small deed of ours and judging us,” this nun tells Sony nonetheless. You feel the weight of that line in Family, in which images of saints, prophets and pontiffs watch over every household. Many tableaux present the characters from a slightly elevated, “altar” view corresponding to the pictures on the wall; a few others feature characters looking up offscreen in prayer, as though waiting for intimations from an invisible power. The shot in which we learn the truth about Sony is perversely cut to a painting of the Christ, as though He is overseeing these events in silence. Family is a film about seeing, not seeing and refusing to see, and it is filled with electrifying reverse shots hinting at unseen, unknown forces.
Among the filmmaker’s previous features, I’ve only watched Everything Is Cinema (2021), whose total subjectivity seems starkly different the objective, omniscient approach of Family. Everything Is Cinema operates entirely on an ironic level, staking its success on the viewer’s capacity to distinguish between the protagonist’s and the filmmaker’s points of view. It chose to tread a very tricky territory, so it made sure it put quotation marks around the lead character’s perspective whenever the viewer identification with him proved too problematic.
Family, in that regard, is a more assured work. It still incriminates its characters, but does so with a confidence and flair that stems from a firmer subject position. The film is rigorously composed, with a fine sense of balance within static frames. The elliptical storytelling, the sparing score, and the purposeful construction of shots, with every glance and movement invested with specific meaning, oblige us to pay close attention. In return, they refine our understanding of the story and the characters. (There is a Haneke-like quality to Family, with all its attendant strengths and drawbacks.) As the film unfolds, even mundane scenes, such as a child playing around the house, become gripped by an ineffable dread. This dread finds expression in the climactic image of a majestic leopard — a stunning reverse shot that both shocks in its unexpected directness and offers a strange closure by representing the unrepresentable.
Yet the film isn’t overdetermined by its central conceit. What we learn about Sony may colour our view of his behaviour, but it doesn’t exhaust it. Emanating from the film is the impression that, beyond personal motivations for integrating himself more and more into his community, Sony is genuinely concerned with its betterment, that the community represents for him a reprieve from the harsh reality of his home. Similarly, the community’s attempts to suppress scandal and silence objectors may be a self-preservation mechanism, but it also comes to reflect the community’s essential fragility, its reasonable fear that the cohesive force keeping the village together will come undone.
I suspect some of these nuances will be lost in discussions around the film, given our era of renewed moral puritanism. To be sure, Family does not mince its words. If anything, it is too blunt and severe in its criticism of the Church, which looms large later in the film. The characters around Sony may not be entirely convinced of his wrongdoing, but the film makes his misdemeanour absolutely clear to us, while at the same time not allowing us to be complicit in it as witnesses. In doing so, however, the film doesn’t feel the need to be sanctimonious, to segregate good from evil on our behalf. For Family deals in human and systemic complexity, refusing easy answers to questions that we would rather brush under the carpet.
The Seventh Art 