One’s sense of reality and time are skewed when watching Florian Zeller’s “The Father”. The film, which is based off of the play “Le Père”, follows closely through the mind and daily activities of an elderly man who is showing his first signs of dementia.
Florian Zeller first wrote his French play “Le Père” based off of his personal attempt to articulate the near indescribable feeling of watching someone he cared for experience their mind slip into disorientation. When the time came to re-write the script for the film adaption “The Father”, Zeller’s goal was to flip the narrative from solely watching someone experience the loss of their sense of self, to instead mirror their experience back to the audience to activity convey an understanding of what a person with dementia sees, hears, and feels in their day-to-day.
Anthony, who is played by Sir Anthony Hopkins, is an elderly man whose daughter Anne, played by Olivia Colman, is forced to watch the quick degradation of her father’s mind as he slips into dementia. The story unfolds as Anne searches for a full-time care taker for her father. With each care taker that is brought into Anthony’s large flat, the audience is exposed to a new layer of his illness. Anthony first shows deep skepticism towards Anne’s urgency for an in-house worker, he expresses distrust towards his previous care takers, subsequently giving Anne a “hard time” in her effort to find him consistent care. This stubbornness is first presented to push the assumption that this is a character trait of Anthony, that he is going to be a witty, headstrong old man, who believes himself to be on some level, invincible. It is with each interaction that Anthony falls into that this false sense of invincibility proves to be a facade presented by his brain to mask the deep complexity of his illness. As his illness progresses, traces of Anthony begin to disappear, we watch as he desperately tries to hold onto pieces of himself as they escape right before his eyes. From losing his ability to recognize his loved ones and not being able to comprehend the space his body occupies, to being so far from reality in the physical that time is no longer a concrete concept to his existence, the viewer is forced to sit and watch in utter discomfort as a man full of grit turns into someone comparable to a helpless child.
The heart achingly vivid frustration and sadness seen in Anthony is devastating to watch as a viewer, but it is in Anne’s tireless negotiating and attempts to maintain a connection with her father that instills fear and pain in the film’s audience. As Anne realizes that her father’s dementia has escalated and will continue to progress, her partner, who has mistreated and manipulated Anthony by taking advantage of his illness, adds guilt on to her shoulders by convincing her that she is no help and that he requires professional care. It is not the fact that Anthony does not require this care that is difficult to watch, on the contrary he does, it is seeing the pain in Anne while she makes a life altering decision for her father, one he likely wont ever truly understand, when all she wanted was to do right his eyes.
Throughout the film Zeller ensured that his viewer wasn’t only sympathizing with the characters on an empathetic level; rather he enforced a disorienting likeness to Anthony’s illness onto the screen by skewing the timeline out of sequential order, and by slowly manipulating the character’s setting to cause the viewer to feel disconcerted. By creating this disorientating experience for the viewer they are able to connect with Anthony’s experience first hand. In an interview Zeller explained; “And step by step, always in the background, you have small changes, small metamorphoses in the set, and you never quite know exactly what happened, but something has happened, so you have the feeling you are in the same place, and yet also somewhere else. It was a way to make the audience doubt where we are, and to play with the feeling of disorientation.”
Over and over, Anthony loses his watch, a sign of him losing both his sense of time and memory. Each time Anthony loses his watch in the film the more his mind slips away, like a petal falling from a rose exposing yet another layer of his illness. The more Anthony loses his watch the fewer layers of petals remain, eventually leaving only a delicate shell of man for the audience to achingly connect with.
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.