Through Thick and Thin
By Mark Asch
New York Film Festival 2025:
Father Mother Sister Brother
Dir. Jim Jarmusch, U.S., MUBI
Writing in Artforum on Yasujiro Ozu’s centenary, Jim Jarmusch described the master’s work in a way that made clear its influence on his own becalmed, understated filmography: “All that is left on screen,” he said of Ozu, “are the smallest details of human nature and interaction, delivered through a lens that is delicate, observational, reductive, and pure.” From here you could draw a pretty straight line to Jarmusch’s stripped-down affect: he’s a filmmaker of long pauses, minimal gestures, and mysterious objects, a Zen rock gardener cultivating primarily negative space. (I think of John Leonard on Joan Didion: “Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than could be expected, as if to square a sandbox for the Sphinx.”)
Jarmusch also noted that young Japanese critics expressed surprise that the director of the extremely fashionable postpunk movie Stranger Than Paradise had much time for a filmmaker as unfashionable as Ozu then was. In response, he drew a distinction between mere “fashion” and “style,” and claimed an affinity to Ozu on the latter terms—nevertheless, his deadpan mode can read as a form of diffident cool, as in Coffee and Cigarettes, a series of sketches of musicians, poets, and scenesters simply hanging out. His new film, Father Mother Sister Brother, is, like Coffee and Cigarettes, an omnibus depicting several brief encounters—three novella-length episodes, rather than the earlier film’s flash fiction—each punctuated by a chessboard-like overhead shot of cups and saucers and glasses and dishware strewn about like clues to the mood of that particular encounter. A couple of related significant differences is that in Father Mother Sister Brother the beverage of choice is more likely to be tea; no one smokes anymore; and the meeting takes place in a parent’s house rather than in a hipster coffee shop. Like late Ozu, with his parade of seasonally titled shomin-geki exploring the practically endless permutations of family life, Father Mother Sister Brother is a series of intergenerational vignettes. And here, the dead air characteristic of Jarmusch’s films is a fit for the stiltedness of family time.
In “Father,” brother and sister Jeff and Emily (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) drive out to rural New Jersey to visit their father. Blazered and trepidatious in Jeff’s hybrid SUV, they pre-brief for their first meeting with Dad in a couple years, trying to figure out the last time they talked, the last time they respectively gave him money, whether either of them knows what he’s up to. He’s a real character, they agree, but they don’t really know how he made a living. On the drive up, they pass skateboarders rolling along the road in slow motion, a moment of parentless lyricism that will be one of several motifs recurring across all three sections of the film, like small talk about water and Zodiac signs. These rhymes give Jarmusch’s minimally inflected dramas the structure of music, and also feel like writing aides, dots set down on a blank page to give him something to connect—an apt feeling in Father Mother Sister Brother, whose characters are often desperate to fill the space by, for instance, seizing on the eccentricity of the idiom “Bob’s your uncle” and parsing it from every possible angle before falling back into silence.
“Father,” it transpires, is Tom Waits—his offspring must have become so bourgeois in compensation. With his (now dyed) shock of eraserhead hair and phlegmy muttering voice, he appears every inch the hermit, and his home, its coziness shading into clutter, suggests a man of dubious self-sufficiency, with its stacks of books on the floor and back issues of Beaver Enthusiast magazine strewn about, its mismatched glassware and dripping sink. Intriguingly, his sofa and armchairs appear to be a matching set in modish green leather—though he’s covered them in tatty old blankets. Concealment, made a literal element of the scenic design, is also an operating principle in the film. Willfully or inadvertently, characters obscure their interiority from family members.
Dutifully, the family try to get to know each other: Father asks what grade the grandkids are in, the kids ask after their dad’s health (Waits filibusters with a very long list of the recreational drugs he is not taking), and Driver is very affecting as a good son straining to build rapport in a voice that’s slightly more paternalistic than he intends. The Jarmuschian awkward pauses in the conversation also, in this film, signal absence, in this case of the late mother the three toast to—as often happens, the death of a family member has disrupted the equilibrium of the nuclear unit, who never managed to reconfigure themselves to cover the gap in the dynamic.
By the end of the trip, son and daughter are apologizing that they can’t stay for dinner this time, then letting out a long sigh of relief in the car ride away, tinged with a bit of guilt over Father’s apparent loneliness. You can’t choose your family, melancholy Jeff muses in the car, momentarily forgetting that his sister, to whom he does not appear especially close, is there in the passenger seat. But there’s an O. Henry reversal, as Jarmusch often uses in his short-form work: the sheets come off the furniture, and the father’s fully formed, very intentional, rather bohemian life is revealed, complete with hot rod and old lady.
If “Father” hinges on the rich inner life and wily hipness of a parent pitied by the straight world, “Mother” concerns a creative parent who withholds her essence from her children. Mother (Charlotte Rampling) is the author of several novels, including one called The Boundaries of Love, a title that evokes the real-life parameters she evidently firmly set as she balanced motherhood with the pursuit of an artistic career. Her daughters, Timothea (Cate Blanchett) and Lilith (Vicky Krieps), do not appear to have read her books, and their visit to her Dublin home for an annual afternoon tea (with spread of very elaborate pastries) unfolds in an atmosphere of forced, distant politeness. No father is mentioned or evident in the family photos positioned on the mantlepiece; equally, when Rampling pours the tea and asks “Shall I be mother?”, the question is met with sarcasm—why start now?
The steely, intellectually correct Rampling conveys a ruthless independence and an inability to suffer fools—or children, which amounts to the same thing—and her daughters seem, in different ways, defined by their doomed efforts to measure up to her as peers. Lilith arrives in a car driven by her girlfriend, whom she asks to pose as her Uber driver—another concealment, as are her obviously fanciful stories about career and romantic success—and childishly interrupts whenever Mother offers a compliment to the older, high-strung “Tim,” a middle-aged woman who still asks to be excused from the table.
The film breaks its patterns in its third and final segment, “Sister Brother.” Rather than visiting a single parent’s home, Billy (Luka Sabbat) and Skye (Indya Moore) are mourning the loss of both their mother and father, and though they plan to pay one last visit to their parents’ Paris apartment, now emptied of all their possessions, they make multiple stops along the way, to buy drugs and to have coffee—not tea—in an 11th arrondissement cafe.
Billy and Skye loved, maybe idolized, their parents—in photos, dad has Basquiat dreadlocks and mom wears cool shades. The kids cruise through Paris in a vintage convertible and play mom’s favorite song on the 8-track—Dusty Springfield’s cover of “Spooky,” also the film’s opening-credits song, in a version by Annika Henderson, the British singer-songwriter who also composed the score. Billy and Skye are much younger than the siblings in the previous sections, as well as twins, and it’s perhaps some combination of the two that leads to them being far more honest and affectionate with each other, speaking openly about their feelings, sharing their memories, and cuddling on the floor of their mom and dad’s old bedroom. Dressed in tight, black clothes, they could be straight out of the punk-poetic milieu of Stranger Than Paradise, and their lineage is affirmed in a cameo by The Mother and the Whore’s Françoise Lebrun as their approving old landlady.
There’s a lot about their parents that Billy and Skye don’t know—they appear to have been quite freewheeling artistic types, with multiple fake IDs and several months’ back rent due—but they admired them very much, and look like them, especially Billy’s hair and Skye’s sunglasses. Their journey finally takes them to a suburban storage locker where what seems to be the entirety of their parents’ life is now stacked up in boxes—maybe the stuff, not the real estate, is what makes home in all three sections—and the two begin to consider what to do with their legacy.
One more motif: there’s a watch, that archetypal family heirloom, in all three sections. In “Father” and “Mother” the watch is a knock-off Rolex, purchased by one of the characters, but in “Sister Brother” it’s a real one, handed down from one generation to the next. This is a nice little bit of synergy for the now Rolex-sponsored New York Film Festival, but it also helps to make the film’s serious point about inheritance; it’s surely not a coincidence that the coolest set of kids are the ones who had something passed on to them. In his last few films, Jarmusch has been notably warm towards young people, such as the hipster kids of The Dead Don’t Die—played by Austin Butler, Selena Gomez, and Luka Sabbat again—who shared his taste in music and had a perhaps fanfictional patience for old movies. It is not surprising that this film concerned with disintegrating ties within blood families came from a New York artist who has long surrounded himself with a chosen family of collaborators, as in the mutual admiration society of Coffee and Cigarettes. As Billy and Skye walk away from the camera and out of focus, off into a future like the windblown spiderlings at the end of Charlotte’s Web, the aging bohemian Jarmusch bestows his blessing on a new generation.