Jim Jarmusch’s latest film Father Mother Sister Brother is a quietly devastating meditation on family and mortality. Its themes manifest obliquely and elliptically across a triptych of conversations through visual, verbal, and symbolic motifs. Jarmusch masterfully layers character development in offhand comments and asides. The stilted conversation and non-sequiturs reflect much more truthfully our daily communications. The resulting film is as confounding as it is deeply moving.

        The initial vignette opens with the bookish siblings, Jeff and Emily played by Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik respectively, driving through a snowy American suburb, as a group of teenagers skateboarding, suspended in slow motion. The pair anxiously discuss the impending visit with their father, brought to life by Tom Waits. Their worried conversation punctuated by quick cuts to the father scattering detritus across his house—books, blankets, boxes. The siblings debate whether they ought to be financially supporting him. Arriving at the father’s home, Jeff pops the trunk and pulls out a box of food, much to his sister’s indignant bemusement. The ensuing conversation is equal parts heartbreaking, comedic, and surreal. The father eventually invites his children to stay for dinner, but the pair deny his invite. The siblings question if they have ever really known or even personally related to their father as they drive away. They realize he has always been a stranger to them.

        Meanwhile, the father cleans the clutter away to reveal how stylish and cool his house actually is. He descends from the second floor sporting a red velvet suit, flops down onto his dark forest green leather couch and calls an anonymous friend whom he asks out for dinner and drinks as he’s just scored some cash. The father then pulls a tarp off a pristine BMW before driving away, calling into question everything we previously witnessed.

        The second vignette begins in Dublin with a mother, Charlotte Rampling as Catherine Russell, on the phone with her therapist relaying her anxiety about seeing her two daughters: Timothea and Lilith played by Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps. Timothea is more neurotic, though seemingly more stable while Lilith lives recklessly as a free-spirited grifter. We are introduced to the daughters as they drive to visit their mother. As Timothea drives, we again see a different group of skateboarders in slow motion until the engine sputters and stops. She makes a panicked phone call to the mother and an even more panicked call to roadside assistance. Lilith is being driven by her friend Jeanette. Neither seems to be coping with adulthood well.

        When both sisters finally arrive at their mother’s house, she goes to prepare their annual tea in the kitchen. There is a cut to the sisters looking through a box of books bearing their mother’s name, indicating that she is a prominent fiction writer. Timothea comments that their mother would hate to see them looking at her work like this. Catherine announces that tea is ready. We get to see an immaculate spread of biscuits, cakes, jams, and the like. The bountiful repast only further accentuates the woefully anemic conversation. When asked about what each daughter is doing with their lives, Lilith makes dubious references to being very successful with a slew of influencer clients who accept spiritual guidance from her. Timothea reveals that she has secured a position on the local history society’s town council which selects local sites to preserve. Her accomplishment is met with indifference. A particularly revealing moment arises when the mother cheekily asks, “Shall I play mother?” to which the younger sister responds that she might as well start now.

        The final section introduces us to a pair of twins in Paris, Billy and Skye portrayed by Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore. The pair meet at a cafe and commiserate over espresso, both sporting black leather jackets. We learn that their parents have recently died, though the reason is withheld from the audience for now. Skye is grateful that her brother took on the burden of cleaning out the parents’ apartment into a storage unit. Billy insists that it was no trouble and that he was happy to take on the responsibility. While driving over to their parents’ now vacant apartment in the family’s vintage car, they recount fond memories of driving in the car listening to music during which Skye looks out and sees, once again, another new gang of teenagers skateboarding down the street weaving through traffic. Arriving at the apartment building, Skye is surprised at how small the rooms feel now. As children, the space felt so massive. They examine old photos of their parents, pointing out how young and vital they appear. They lament and express their astonishment that their parents died in a small biplane crash. Their reverie is interrupted by Madame Gautier, the landlady portrayed by Françoise Lebrun. She informs the twins that they need to leave soon. The pair acquiesce and gratefully remember when Madame Gautier used to babysit them and allow their family to skate by if they couldn’t afford the rent. Skye and Billy take one last longing look before departing.

        Standing in front of the storage unit, Billy reveals that about a third of their parents’ possessions were actually inherited from their grandparents. It is a powerful sentiment; the idea that our sense of self, our identities are conceived generationally through these material inheritances. The idea sounds imposing, however Jarmusch frames it through the visual of a tiny storage unit. A vast sprawling life reduced to a tiny box in a Parisian garage.

Jarmusch’s latest film displays his mastery of class as a writer and director. This film is a close examination of family and mortality. Instead of telling a singular cohesive story, Father Mother Sister Brother knots together the triptych through recurring motifs: the slow-motion skateboarders, the verisimilitude of fake Chinese Rolexes, the idiom “Bob’s your uncle,” the drinking of water, the act of toasting to memorialize an occasion, and so on. There is a unity generated by the recurrence and recognition of these motifs.

         Jarmusch has been developing this structural approach over several years such as in films like Mystery Train and Coffee and Cigarettes. In the former, the three narratives become connected by a hotel in downtown Memphis, while in the latter the multitude of vignettes are all focused on the eponymous combination of coffee and cigarettes. This editing technique allows the audience to excavate the themes as they emerge and emerge again. In particular, the slow-motion footage of the skateboarders is comparable to a cinematic device of Yasujirō Ozu’s pillow shots. These were moments of stillness in Ozu’s films, typically depicting nature, architecture, or objects in the mise-en-scene. These provided pauses for the audience to consider the interactions taking place in the story.¹ It attempts to subtly provoke the audience by creating a heightened realism, reflective of the stilted emotions and awkward silences found in some of our own family dynamics. Father Mother Sister Brother announces a new creative peak for Jarmusch’s minimalist cinema.

John Thomure is a performance artist and writer currently based in Chicago. His performance and writing practices fixate on local art history, ecology, and exploring underappreciated artists and their archives.

Notes

1.  Leigh Singer, “The Enigmatic ‘Pillow Shots’ of Yasujiro Ozu,” BFI, September 8, 2016-2023. https://www.bfi.org.uk/features/enigmatic-pillow-shots-yasujiro-ozu?ref=hyperallergic.com