TEMPORALITY AND THE FIGHT FOR MEANING IN ‘THE FATHER’ (2020)
BY DREW TILLOTSON
In a pivotal scene very near the end of Florian Zeller’s 2020 film The Father, the titular character Anthony (played by Sir Anthony Hopkins) says to a caregiver in a heartbreaking moment of memory struggle, “I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves ... the branches and the wind and the rain ... I don’t know what’s happening anymore.” As audience, we can identify with this sentiment, since from the beginning of the film we have been confused at times regarding who exactly is who and what the consensual truth is. The brilliance of this film is that from the very first moment, we are seeing the world through the eyes of Anthony, who we quickly learn suffers from advancing dementia. Only at the end do we realize the entire film is quite possibly an après-coup experience in Anthony’s mind—muddled by disjointed temporality—a Nachträglichkeit of memories and grief amplified by an ever-growing anxiety about losing all sense of reality.
The film follows Anthony, an elderly Londoner, and his daughter Anne as they navigate Anthony’s poignant mental decline. We enter the story at a point when Anne has patiently and lovingly tried to help arrange care for her father, yet he refuses, concedes, berates, complains, and accuses. He is aware he needs help but stubbornly makes help impossible. At the top of the film, we see Anne informing Anthony she is hiring a new caregiver after three caregivers have left due to Anthony’s difficult behavior. Anne pleads with him to accept this new caregiver and tells him that if he will not cooperate, she will be forced to move him into a nursing home. Additionally, she explains her plans to leave London and move to Paris for a romantic relationship, but says she will return to visit him in London on occasional weekends.
This opening sequence sets the stage for Anthony’s accusations of abandonment: he angrily states he will not move out of his flat. Over the course of the first half of the film we discover that Anthony has been living in Anne’s flat for some time. Yet we are often left wondering which flat we are in at any given point, due to the way Zeller has conceived the plot and action. As the film unfolds, we realize we are experiencing events as Anthony is seeing them subjectively. We are meant to be disoriented as an audience but only become aware of this gradually, which is unsettling but riveting. Zeller’s craft allows a familiar tale to be fresh instead of becoming lugubrious.
Zeller is a French novelist, playwright, theatre director, screenwriter, and now film director. The Father was based on his 2012 play Le Pere (part of a trilogy that includes The Son and The Mother). He cowrote the screenplay with playwright Christopher Hampton. In an interview conducted by Virtual Village Hall, Zeller stated the film was not based exactly on his personal story, but on his experience of being raised by his grandmother, who slipped into dementia when he was fifteen years old. The emotions of watching her slow decline, he says, inspired him to try to capture something cinematically about the world of those who decline into dementia, and those who love them both as witness and caregiver.
All the scenes were filmed on a set that Zeller had constructed to resemble one apartment that is remembered as Anthony’s former flat, his daughter Anne’s current flat, and finally the nursing facility. From scene to scene the color palettes shift from brown to blue, the backsplash in the kitchen gains differently placed tiles, furniture subtly changes—or does it? Again, we can never be certain whose flat we are in.
Zeller makes use of time, place, and person through the lens of Anthony’s subjective experience. Zeller comments on this in the interview:
What I wanted to try to do is to tell that story from the inside ... as if the audience was going through a labyrinth, as if the audience was in the main character’s head. ... I didn’t want the father to be just a story. I wanted the father to be an experience ... the experience of what it could mean to lose everything, including your own bearings as a viewer. ... It was the most exciting part of the process to play with that feeling of disorientation of the audience. And I thought that the cinema, thanks to its language, could turn this experience into an even more immersive experience and even more disturbing and powerful. It was a way to play with the sets, to play with the frames, to play with the combinations so that you are constantly doubting about everything, and at the same time you know where you are because you recognize the space and the way to travel into that space. But on the other hand ... you’re never sure of where you are because there are many metamorphoses on set. ... So, you are in this unique position. You know where you are, and at the same time you do not know ... It was also, as I said, a way for me to ... put the audience in an active position ... to fight for the meaning, in a way. ... I made the decision to stay in this apartment throughout the film—to stay in this space so that that space could become like a mental space.
Zeller accomplishes this effect in a disturbingly seamless fashion: the viewer does indeed need to “fight for the meaning” and pay close attention to detail. This film is potentially of interest to psychoanalysts for this very reason: the cinematic space “becoming a mental space” gives the film an oneiric quality at times. Time itself shifts backwards and forwards abruptly throughout, creating a temporality analogous to Freud’s idea of the timelessness of the unconscious. Scenes repeat themselves with slightly altered words and with different faces and personalities that are confused for real people in the present. Anthony’s present is confused with recollections of the past as his paranoia and ever-shifting emotions increase over the course of the film.
Temporality informs the entire fabric of this film, and temporality of course is a significant part of psychoanalytic work. We know that being in present time requires the capacity to distinguish the past and the present. Yet, in psychoanalysis we understand that time and memory can be distorted by subjectivity and revision; that our dreamlife is a biological necessity that reveals glimpses into the unconscious; and that repression is an essential function which helps us to bear psychic existence. Andre Green took particular interest in Freud’s spare writings on temporality. In his Key Ideas for Contemporary Psychoanalysis: Misrecognition and Recognition of the Unconscious (Routledge, 2005), Green devotes a chapter to “Space(s) and Time.” He says:
Surely the most revolutionary advance Freud made was that debasement of psychic processes subject to the passage of time ... This system requires the help of a special mechanism in order to avoid being submerged by anxiety – namely, repression. The price to be paid for its efficacy is that important parts of our memory are sacrificed; consequently, it is incomplete concerning certain important events of our past.
Yet dementia is different from repression. It is far from relatively normal mental processing. It is a progressive, degenerative disease that robs an individual of accurate memory functioning and basic cognitive capacities, causing an inevitable breakdown in temporality and loss of basic bodily functions. Repression is unavailable, and as Green said, “time is an infinite torturing experience, to the point even of making us hope that death will intervene to deliver us from it.”
If the film makes use of time, place, and person to immerse us in Anthony’s world, these three factors function in distinct ways. With regards to time, in several scenes Anthony cannot find his watch and complains that someone has stolen it. At first, Anthony finds his watch, then minimizes the paranoia and anger he has expressed only moments before. As the film unfolds and his dementia increases, Anthony says to Anne after finding his watch, “I’m losing all my things. Everyone’s just helping themselves. And if this goes on much longer, I’ll be stark naked. I won’t be able to tell what time it is.” The watch becomes a motif: we see how Anthony relies on it to desperately stay connected to the passage of time; it becomes the only thing that connects him to the present, however thinly. It is an object of constancy when he finds it, but his tormenting suspicion grows as the film evolves.
Place becomes a confusion for the audience as much as it is for Anthony. At first this is dizzying, until we realize eventually that Anthony has been living with Anne for some time, long ago giving up his own flat. From moment to moment, we are seeing a memory of Anthony in his own flat, then we realize we are in Anne’s apartment. These shifts are subtle, and the viewer is kept wondering—as is Anthony—where exactly are we?
Person becomes a motif of bewilderment as well. For example, Anne is first played by Olivia Coleman, who in one early scene goes out to the store to get a chicken for dinner. When she returns from the store, she is suddenly played by a different actress, Olivia Williams, who also appears at the end of the film as Anthony’s personal caregiver at the nursing home. Another scene shows Anne’s new romantic partner Paul, who is visiting from Paris, having a drink and reading the newspaper in the parlor. Then the same scene is repeated later with Paul played by another actor who we later realize is Anthony’s male nurse at the nursing home. The repeating of scenes played by different actors happens throughout, increasingly reflecting the disorientation Anthony is living through. As viewers we live through the same perplexity; the past is not reliable, and the present is unsure, and we long for Anthony’s suffering to be truncated.
During final scenes in the nursing home, Zeller shifts to a more objective perspective: we see the scene through the eyes of Anthony’s personal caregiver Catherine, who urges Anthony to calm down and get dressed so they may take a walk outside together. This abrupt shift leaves us wondering if we have been in the nursing facility the entire time, hence the Nachträglichkeit of Anthony’s decline, and the confusion in characters and places. Has the entire film been a recollection, or even a dream that Anthony awakens from suddenly?
The Father is not an easy film to watch; when you think you cannot be any sadder, you are. Yet, there is much here that speaks to what we see in clinical life: that time and memory are experienced in nonlinear ways. In no way am I suggesting that a disease process can be compared with normal mental processes in how memories are formed and how time is experienced. What I suggest is that a psychoanalyst viewing this film may be reminded that the loss dementia inflicts is immeasurable. A life review and the capacity to mourn become lost when past, present, and future become blurred.
In the final shot, we see the camera pan through the window to the trees waltzing in the breeze. We are left with the image of an alive, deeply verdant world just outside the torment of Anthony’s existence. We see the leaves that Anthony imagines he is losing firmly attached to branches. The contrast of those leaves just out of reach for Anthony haunts us, knowing each day slips closer to the void he will gradually inhabit. But our conception of that void comes with our ability to situate ourselves within temporality. It is not Anthony’s void. His void will be merciful because he will not know that he does not know and what he cannot find in a timeless world. And that is some relief for us. ■
Drew Tillotson, PsyD, FIPA, BCPsa, is in private practice in San Francisco. He has published in the International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Studies in Gender & Sexuality, and Fort da, and is coeditor of, and contributor to, Body as Psychoanalytic Object: Clinical Applications from Winnicott to Bion and Beyond (2021).
