French director Mia Hansen-Løve has a knack for making unimpeachably delicate films about emotionally clobbering rites of passage. She has navigated death, divorce and traumatic adolescence with a softness that never quite turns to mush. Her most recent film, One Fine Morning – now available to stream on Mubi – takes the same approach to that strangest and most tender of life reversals, when children become their parents’ carers. Following a Parisian single mother (a never-better Léa Seydoux) as she reckons with the complications of steering her elderly, partially sighted father through the national care home system, from grappling with his dementia to redistributing his book collection, it’s quietly devastating, with pockets of warm humour and optimism.
Hansen-Løve has tackled the poignancy of parenting one’s parents before, with the passive-aggressive duet between Isabelle Huppert and the late Édith Scob among the highlights of her lovely 2016 film Things to Come (also on Mubi). Both films join a select canon of works on a subject audiences aren’t always eager to face. Some directors tackle it with overcompensating sentimentality, others with confrontational rawness. On the former end of the scale, look to sitcom creator Gary David Goldberg’s 1989 film-making debut Dad, one of a slew of laughter-through-the-tears, parent-child dramas that Hollywood dreamed up in the wake of Terms of Endearment. Starring Ted Danson as a brisk businessman reconnecting with his father (Jack Lemmon) as the latter’s health deteriorates, it’s glibly, even mechanically melodramatic, but Lemmon’s increasingly vulnerable performance gets to you anyway.
For a more convincingly tough take on a similar scenario, look to an undercelebrated British indie from a few years ago. Tom Browne’s remarkable Radiator (Amazon) bristles with vocal hostilities and unspoken tensions in its portrait of a middle-aged man (Daniel Cerqueira) returning to the cramped Cumbrian cottage shared by his parents (Gemma Jones and Richard Johnson). His father is truculent, his mother cowed; his frequently thwarted attempts to look after them don’t culminate in convenient catharsis, but more compromised grace.
There’s more joy and demonstrative affection in Mike Mills’s affecting, autobiographical Beginners, which won Christopher Plummer a well-deserved Oscar as a dutiful husband and father who finally comes out of the closet after his wife’s death. Ewan McGregor is the adult son repaying his father’s care in this bittersweet new chapter. Parental queerness also surfaces in François Ozon’s Everything Went Fine, a level-headed, compassionate study of a family coming to terms with its frail patriarch’s wish for assisted dying.
The friction of parents and children living together as adults is explored in American playwright Horton Foote’s wise, aching The Trip to Bountiful (Amazon), lifted by Geraldine Page’s exquisite performance as a widow unable to feel at home in her son’s household. In Tamara Jenkins’s jaggedly funny The Savages, meanwhile, two siblings (Laura Linney and Philip Seymour Hoffman, both wonderful) share the burden of their father’s Alzheimer’s, a challenge that places their differing familial roles and priorities in stark relief.
As I’ve written about before, the ravages of dementia and its effects on the family have been a prominent concern in films of late. Florian Zeller’s Oscar-winning The Father and Kirsten Johnson’s brilliantly playful documentary Dick Johnson Is Dead (both on Netflix) are intensely moving portraits of children holding on to their parents’ slipping memories. But in Ang Lee’s delightful, food-fuelled Eat Drink Man Woman (Curzon), as three daughters variously fuss and fret over their widowed chef father, their care carries him to a new marriage. In Albert Brooks’s mordantly comic Mother, a divorced writer moves back in with his brittle mother, only for the arrangement to renew creativity on both sides. Not all stories of parenting one’s parents face the void; sometimes the switch is merely a fresh start.
All titles are available to rent on multiple platforms unless otherwise specified.
Also new on streaming and DVD
Extraction 2
(Netflix)
Produced by the Russo brothers, stuntman turned director Sam Hargrave’s Extraction came out in the early days of the 2020 lockdown, an optimal time for passable, straight-to-streaming Chris Hemsworth action fodder. This businesslike sequel, continuing the scowling adventures of black ops commando Tyler Rake, isn’t notably different, but you have more options now.
Horseplay
(Matchbox Films)
Argentinian director Marco Berger specialises in stories of masculine desires and resentments at odds with each other. He’s in his element in this carefully observed, slow-burning but consistently tense study of several ostensibly straight male friends gathering for Christmas at a country villa, as their constant pranking and banter reveals deeper, darker anxieties and prejudices.
The Pope’s Exorcist
(Sony)
The devil is up to his usual tricks in this unabashedly derivative, entertainingly grisly possession thriller, which is classed up a bit by Russell Crowe’s droll, tongue-in-bearded-cheek performance as real-life Vatican demon-slayer Father Gabriele Amorth. Don’t let this allusion to fact fool you, however: this is knockoff-Exorcist nonsense all the way.
The Night of the 12th
(Picturehouse)
French director Dominik Moll’s intelligently methodical, latently seething true-crime procedural was a big deal in France, where it swept the César awards, but deserved more attention in cinemas here. Tracing the unsolved murder of a teenage girl in a quiet suburb, it expands into a damning map of systemic misogyny in the police force and beyond.
