A Fam­i­ly – first-look review

The author Chris­tine Angot will like­ly be known to Eng­lish-speak­ing audi­ences for her blunt­ly con­fes­sion­al auto-fic­tion­al 1999 nov­el sim­ply titled, ​‘Incest’, but also for hav­ing penned screen­plays for two excel­lent films direct­ed by Claire Denis: Let the Sun­shine In and Both Sides of the Blade. 

With her unbear­ably intense and, in many ways, unique debut doc­u­men­tary, A Fam­i­ly, she adopts both the brusque­ly chal­leng­ing per­son­al man­ner and inqui­si­tion-style mode of ques­tion­ing seen by the great Claude Lanz­mann in his film Shoah, in which the film­mak­er is vio­lent­ly insis­tent with his on-cam­era sub­jects as they recount first-hand hor­rors of the Holocaust. 

Lanz­mann viewed the cam­era as a tool for live archiv­ing, but was aware that any hard evi­dence gleaned from his inter­views will inevitably be laden with emo­tion and sub­ject to the ingrained sur­vival instincts of the per­son bear­ing their soul. Angot’s strat­e­gy here is sim­i­lar­ly inclined towards the nor­mal­is­ing of dis­com­fort, but it is the per­fect strat­e­gy to her achieve her intend­ed goals of find­ing out exact­ly why her fam­i­ly and friends remained silent while, from the age of 13, she was being raped by her (since deceased) father. 

We under­stand that Angot’s trau­ma has metas­ta­sised from cowed incom­pre­hen­sion in her teens and younger-mid­dle age to vio­lent rage in the present, and she has reached a point in her life where she no longer sees her fam­i­ly as being inno­cent bystanders while she suf­fered this repeat­ed pat­tern of abuse. The light­ly fic­tion­alised accounts from Incest did not give her the clo­sure (or at least some vague answers) that she now demands, and so with A Fam­i­ly she doorsteps her rel­a­tives and says to them point blank: you knew it was hap­pen­ing so why didn’t you help? Angot shows no pre­tence for warmth and is def­i­nite­ly not look­ing for a rea­son to for­give, and in many ways this is a film about, if not so much admin­is­ter­ing pun­ish­ment, then at least mak­ing sure that the extent of her trau­ma is both under­stood and pos­si­bly shared. 

Two moments stand out, both blood­cur­dling in their own way: the first sees Argot and her crew forc­ing entry into her estranged mother’s house and demand­ing a sit-down inter­view on cam­era. A yelling match ensues and the pres­ence of the cam­era (which her moth­er protests) ends up being the rea­son why a dia­logue is even­tu­al­ly reached. Yet we dis­cov­er lat­er that her moth­er was not hap­py about what she feels was a vio­lent impo­si­tion, which under­cuts any pre­tence towards sin­cer­i­ty in her testimony. 

Anoth­er near-unwatch­able sequence takes the form of some archive footage of a glossy TV debate show in which Angot is not just pil­lo­ried but insult­ed to her face for hav­ing writ­ten ​‘Incest’. The pre­sen­ters and mem­bers of the pan­el mock her for hav­ing direct­ly chan­neled this expe­ri­ence into lit­er­a­ture, and seem to com­plete­ly over­look (or be unsym­pa­thet­ic towards) the fact that Angot tore out her own heart to write that novel. 

This sequence empha­sis­es, with a bru­tal­i­ty of intent, the extreme gaslight­ing that Angot was sub­ject­ed to where her trau­ma wasn’t mere­ly reject­ed but she was made to feel like an accom­plice in her own down­fall. And it’s pos­si­bly the rea­son why this impor­tant film, which is very cir­cum­spect about the pos­si­bil­i­ty of cathar­sis in such mat­ters, exists.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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