Family Portrait

Part of my coverage of the 59th Chicago International Film Festival.

FAMILY PORTRAIT   **

Lucy Kerr

2023

IDEA:  An extended family comes together for a family portrait, but when the matriarch goes missing, the day is thrown into turmoil.

BLURB:  At once quiet and disquieting, Family Portrait begins with a long tracking shot of a group of people walking through the woods, their voices muffled to the point of inaudibility under the amplified outdoor ambience. Opacity and elusiveness will continue to be the operating principles of the film, which obliquely gestures toward a number of themes without crystallizing into shape. Kerr takes an approach that has become ossified in European art films; prizing visual austerity, psychological ambiguity, and an elliptical narrative structure, she builds her film out of questions that are never on track to be resolved. In lieu of exposition, a free-floating mood of dread takes over in becalmed, static images and conversations about mysterious illnesses. Is this a COVID-19 allegory? Suddenly, a mother goes missing, and the titular portrait is infinitely deferred. Have we entered the realm of Antonioni-esque bourgeois inertia, Buñuelian syuzhet interruptus? There are myriad possibilities here, but Kerr either lacks the conviction or the purpose to fully pursue them, seemingly content with introducing vague signifiers that may or may not be symbolic of whatever it is we see in them. Maybe it’s a Rorschach test, or maybe it’s more of a blank slate.