The Clos­er We Get

Indul­gence and obscure inter­per­son­al con­cerns are always a poten­tial pit­fall of those who opt to turn a cam­era on the lives of their own imme­di­ate fam­i­ly. Direc­tor Karen Guthrie has decid­ed to get extreme­ly inti­mate with her own in The Clos­er We Get, a film which sug­gests that the pres­ence of a cam­era can bring out the best and worst in peo­ple. The film is intend­ed as a piece of auto-ther­a­py, an attempt to cut through the smil­ing façade of her par­ents’ lives, and the film itself is employed as a tool for con­fes­sion, self-reflec­tion and post-event analysis.

The sit­u­a­tion in which she finds her­self at the begin­ning of the doc­u­men­tary is with her moth­er Ann, who in immo­bile hav­ing suf­fered from a stroke, and her father, Ian, who despite hav­ing been sep­a­rat­ed from Ann, decides to return home, not so much to help out, but to clear up a few bits of nag­ging fam­i­ly busi­ness. Guthrie her­self intones a nar­ra­tion which rides on her own inad­e­qua­cies, par­tic­u­lar­ly how she is unable to face up to her father direct­ly and ques­tion the motives of his occa­sion­al­ly eccen­tric actions. She also knows that just because the lit­tle red light on the cam­era is beam­ing, you don’t need to spark undue con­fronta­tion and dis­com­fort. The film is all the more ten­der and frag­ile for the fact that the immense dis­cord fes­ter­ing under­neath the images remains there, only for Karen to acknowl­edge in the edit.

It’s rather bizarre (and dra­mat­i­cal­ly for­tu­itous) just how many twists and sur­pris­es lurk in the future, and it’s clear that this per­haps isn’t the movie that Guthrie orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed to make. She nev­er tries to force mean­ing onto the events that occur, instead just rolling along with them, observ­ing hap­pi­ness rather than con­flict. It chan­nels a tra­di­tion of British social real­ist fic­tion film­mak­ing into a doc­u­men­tary tem­plate, and it simul­ta­ne­ous­ly cel­e­brates and crit­i­cis­es the form’s sen­ti­men­tal ten­den­cies. Pure objec­tiv­i­ty in films like this is a myth, but Guthrie is open about the fact that this is per­son­al. She man­ages to build con­flict with­out caus­ing pain. It’s an excep­tion­al piece of work.