GERMAN FILM FESTIVAL: In the beginning of Pia Strietmann’s A Family of Three, a film about the emotional tangle that precedes the onset of grief, a woman driving in her car has an accident and time recedes: the car spins, glass sprays across her face in slow motion, and she moves from one world to the unknown next. For the rest of Strietmann’s film, the family of the deceased, Elaine (Lena Stolze), undergoes a considered expansion of that sudden shock, as seconds extend out to days and the gravity of everyday life disappears.
Filmmakers are drawn to loss for the sudden, sometimes scarifying, clarity that it provides to their characters; facades disappear and there are often unpleasant truths to be addressed. It is a fascinating, emotionally raw undertaking, but it’s also part of the collective storytelling fabric and unless a movie has its own voice, insight can go the way of cliché. In Strietmann’s picture, which she co-wrote with Lea Schmidbauer, you’re dogged by the feeling that the irreconcilable silences and sudden surrenders are faintly predictable. It is fitting in a way, as the characters search for the comfort of what they suddenly miss, the film’s familiarity gives that very quality to the audience.
Seen in flashback, as the mayor of her German city congratulates her at a civic reception for the success of her novel, Andrea thanks her family for giving her 'the time and space" to finish her book. It is gratitude that masks a lament: her husband, Christian (Götz Schubert) is having an affair with a musician, her son Lars (Max Riemelt) is a struggling actor in Berlin who refuses to come home, and her teenage daughter, Elaine (Mathilde Bundschuh) is adrift in rebellious spite and nascent sexual power. Once the matriarch is gone, and the trio is thrown together, flickers of discord are apparent as they move amidst the hard concrete surfaces and diverse planes of the family home.
The journey is familiar, but Strietmann aims to capture the details that illuminate the internalised pain. Sometimes she gets it just right, as when Lars chooses the most expensive coffin and tells the undertaker, his former school friend Benjamin (Michael Cranz) that his father 'should have to pay". Lars is too angry to grieve, Elaine too shocked, and Christian too conflicted. When the latter leaves his children to be with his lover, Babsi (Franziska Weisz), he doesn’t tell her what has happened, and Schubert’s lined, unadorned face leaves you wondering whether he’s being selfish or is just taking refuge.
The director alternates slow zooms, as if searching for clues, with wordless reveries such as Christian sitting amidst the swept up debris of Andrea’s car on the side of the road. 'What helped?" Elaine asks the boy next door, who has already lost his mother, and he simply replies, 'Nothing", but the movie steadily moves towards understanding and reconciliation as the funeral service looms. There is subtlety in the transition, which is enhanced by the performances of the cast, but this good film also feels pre-ordained, and that lessens it.
