Mem­o­ries of My Father

There’s no doubt that there are good, pure, self­less peo­ple in this world who give over their lives entire­ly to enrich the lot of their fel­low man. What Fer­nan­do Trueba’s Mem­o­ries of My Father proves is that they don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly make for par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pelling movie subjects.

Span­ish actor Javier Cámara (best known to UK audi­ences for his aston­ish­ing turn in Pedro Almodovar’s Talk to Her) plays Héc­tor Abad Gómez, a physi­cian and uni­ver­si­ty pro­fes­sor in Medel­lín, Colum­bia dur­ing the 1970s who spreads love and wis­dom among his stu­dents, peers and a large fam­i­ly of his own.

The film goes to crush­ing lengths to cer­ti­fy Héctor’s essen­tial good­ness, not allow­ing a sin­gle moral chink to appear in his armour across its bloat­ed 136-minute run­time. He is lib­er­al at a time of fas­cist groundswell among the gov­ern­ment and mil­i­tary. He is sec­u­lar with­out upset­ting the sto­ical­ly reli­gious with­in his social set. He is prac­ti­cal as a par­ent, opt­ing for free­dom of expres­sion with­in a set of loose bound­aries. And as played by the always-appeal­ing Cámara, he’s also a charm­ing bas­tard. In short, it’s quite easy to resent him and wish him ill.

Despite the fact that Héc­tor is sur­round­ed by women – his dot­ing wife; his many radi­ant daugh­ters; his end­less­ly sup­port­ive sec­re­tary – the film is sole­ly inter­est­ed in his rela­tion­ship with his son, also named Héc­tor (nick­named Quiquín and played by Nicolás Reyes Cano as a pre-teen and Juan Pablo Urrego as a stu­dent), and remains blithe­ly uncrit­i­cal of the fact that this father spends much of his spare time strength­en­ing male rather than female bonds. And yet, aside from a sin­gle short scene, there is no antag­o­nism between the pair, and much of the sto­ry is spent observ­ing the gooey trans­fer­ence of life lessons across the gen­er­a­tional divide.

For the most part, it’s a well con­struct­ed film, and True­ba still has the eye for com­po­si­tion and feel for cam­era move­ment that net­ted him an Acad­e­my Award in 1992 for Belle Époque. The relaxed man­ner in which the actors inter­act with one anoth­er, and the way the bustling fam­i­ly scenes are staged (True­ba is very good at big din­ner table scenes) def­i­nite­ly help to make for an easy (if lengthy) ride.

Yet there’s some­thing inher­ent­ly unsat­is­fy­ing about the film’s ambling struc­ture, as the first hour flies by and noth­ing of great import has real­ly hap­pened. When omi­nous clouds start to form in the sky, True­ba ops for blunt sign­post­ing, akin to when a char­ac­ter is shown ran­dom­ly cough­ing and say­ing ​“Oh, I hope this cough doesn’t get any worse.” Its big cli­max is almost com­i­cal­ly pre­dictable, as Héc­tor finds him­self in the sight­lines of the country’s far-right para­mil­i­tary death squads.