Father Mother Sister Brother

 Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother (2026) is a slight film, a wisp of a thing that is both abstract and feather-light.  There's not much to the movie and the acting, as well as mise en scene are very restrained.  The movie has a nonchalant profundity and I recommend it.  The picture is an omnibus of three narratives (or anti-narratives) in which very little overt happens.  But the stories are tied together in an ingenious way and cumulatively they make an important point:  children are mysteries to their parents and, similarly, parents are enigmas to their children.  We can never really know our father or mother and, in fact, of all human relationships the bond between parents and their children is the most awkward because deeply fraught with emotions that once existed but are now dormant because unnecessary.  Parents love their children when they are small and know everything about them.  But when the children are emancipated, both sides of the relationship grow remote and the silence of incomprehension descends between them.  This silence is heavy and painful because it substitutes for a close and intimate relationship that was once necessary.  Grown children and their parents have little or nothing in common.

In "Father", the first episode, two apparently successful middle-aged siblings are traveling to a remote house in the forest where their father lives alone.  Since the father never really worked, the siblings muse about his entitlement to social security.  They wonder how he survives.  The sister (played by Mayim Bialik) is caustic and skeptical; the brother (Adam Driver) feels guilty about the old man's poverty and the fact that he has not visited for two years.  The father putters about his house, a nice lakeshore property in a deep snowy woods concealing his new furniture under ragged sheets and hiding his expensive appliances.  When the kids arrive, they are distressed by the old man's ruined-looking Chevy pickup and conclude that he is destitute.  The old man (Tom Waitts) has nothing to say to them.  They awkwardly sit in the house, gazing out at the view over the snowy lake and hills.  The son wants to see the new septic system and plumbing that he has financed but the father isn't willing to give him a tour.  They toast to their deceased mother and to "family relations".  The son presents a big box of treats and groceries to his father:  expensive bourbon, Trader Joe style Italian pasta and pickles, cookies and crackers and the like  When brother and sister depart, the son gives his father a wad of cash to "tide you over."  But there is an incongruity that the sister notices:  the old man is wearing a Rolex.  When she comments on it, the father says it is a "fugazi" that is, a fake.  After the couple leave, the father calls a girlfriend, tells her he has some extra cash, and asks her to make a reservation at an expensive restaurant.  Then, he departs, pulling a shroud off his brand-new car that was hidden around the back of the cottage.  

In "Mother", we see a handsome older woman lying on her couch in a very nice home talking to her therapist on the phone.  It's an emergency "phone session" probably intended to shore her up in light of the visit of her two daughters.  One daughter, with flamboyantly colored hair, is riding with her friend, another young woman -- there is an intimation that the women are lesbian lovers.  She wants to arrive in an Uber and, so, the friend lets her off a block from the house so she can claim that she hired a car to take her to the luncheon -- in fact, it's a sort of "high tea".  The other sister is coming by car but her vehicle fails.  She figures out that a wire is disconnected in the engine, reconnects it, and, then, drives to the tea with her mother.  The family members embrace but have nothing to say to one another.  The sister whose car failed says that she has been appointed to a prestigious Board (the Heritage Board) in Dublin.  (The story is set in Dublin.)  We learn that the mother is a romance novelist and, apparently, very successful.  The other daughter with the brightly colored hair tells her mother that she is extremely successful and has made a lot of money.  She shows the mother her designer purse but, then, admits that it's a fake.  The sister with the colored hair calls for an Uber but has to use her mother's app (since she apparently doesn't have any money to pay for the ride).  The three stand silently in the doorway waiting for the Uber to arrive.  During the tea service, the three make a toast with tea to their being reunited on this occasion.

"Sister Brother" involves two handsome siblings who meet in Paris where their parents lived to clean out the family apartment.  (The parents have been killed in an airplane crash in the Azores.)  In fact, the brother, who is micro-dosing on "shrooms", has already cleaned out the rooms and had the furniture and personal effects transported to a storage unit.  There is a close bond between brother and sister and they reminisce about old times.  The brother takes the sister to the apartment which is eerily empty and they sit on the floor looking at old photographs from their childhood and pictures of their parents, a very handsome interracial couple.  The brother is wearing a Rolex watch that he found in his father's effects and they wonder whether the watch is real or fake.  Their parents apparently kept many of their school drawings and pictures and reports. A landlady appears and scolds them for remaining in the apartment.  The brother and sister, then, go to the storage unit packed with old lamps and settees and many, many boxes.  They agree that they never really knew anything about their parents.  The brother makes the comment that some of the boxes now in storage were effects owned by their grandparents which their own parents never bothered to open.  This suggests that the pattern of  mutual incomprehension between parent and child is multi-generational.

Jarmusch imposes a formal order on these materials which, in fact, comprises a single story repeated in three variations.  This story is universal, with examples cited in the United States (rural New Jersey), Dublin, and Paris -- the universal story is that parents and their children are mysteries to one another and that there is a wall of incomprehension between them.  Jarmusch's style is "parametric" to use David Bordwell's term -- the story is subject to "parameters" in the way that it is presented.  In each narrative, we will encounter three young men on skateboards, filmed in slow motion.  (The skateboarding motif is an example of the incomprehensibility of behavior by young people to those older to them.)  Each story will involve a toast or toasts accomplished through a non-alcoholic drink and the question:  can you toast with (tea, coffee, or water)?  Each story will feature diagrammatic vertical shots showing tables with cups and other things on them -- for instance, vertical shots emphasizing the elaborate tea service that is presented by the Mother.  Each story will involve a road trip complete with the amplified sound of turn signals.  In addition, someone will say "Bob's your uncle" or "Robert's your uncle" in each narrative.  In each story, we will be presented with a luxury item that may, or may not, be a "fugazi" -- the rolex watches and the designer handbag.  The continuity of these incidental motifs in all three stories presents the viewer with the sense that the kind of muted conflict that exists in this situation -- parents and children having nothing to say to one another --  assures us that the situation is not particular but universal, even, perhaps, a Platonic essence of how parents and grown children interact.  Jarmusch has done this sort of thing before:  consider his Night on Earth with interlocked stories involving cab rides in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, Rome, and Helsinki, and  his omnibus film about Elvis and Memphis, Ghost Train,, also a series of stories that are formally separate but, nonetheless, connected by motifs and occult repetitions of events and incidental details.  

Apache Drums

 The Museum of Modern Art in New York is presenting a retrospective of Westerns produced by Universal Studios in June and July of this year (2026).  Among the offerings is Apache Drums released in 1951 and directed by Hugo Fregonese.  The picture was produced by Val Lewton, the auteur responsible for films that have attracted a cult status, B movies made on low budgets during World War II -- these pictures include Cat People, The Curse of the Cat People, Isle of the Dead (with Boris Karloff), I walked with a Zombie, and the wildly morbid and disturbing The Seventh Victim said to have influenced Roman Polanski's Rosemary's Baby.  Although these films are all directed, at least nominally, by other people, the highly literate and intelligent Val Lewton's stamp is apparent in all of the pictures.  Apache Drums is Lewton's only Western, produced for Universal, about nine or ten years after the cycle of horror pictures in the early forties for which he is now famous.  The movie is made on a micro-budget and, therefore, has to suggest its effects as opposed to putting lurid images on screen.  The characters are quirky subverting the types that they are playing.  Lewton's low-buck movies always feature wonderful photography and the technicolor imagery in Apache Drums is very effective, particularly in the final sequence involving an Indian siege of townspeople sheltering in an old adobe church.  As is the case with all of the films associated with Lewton, the picture is intensely atmospheric and replete with small, but telling, details.  The movie is marred mostly by its poor players -- the principals in the film are C-grade or worse Universal contract players and they are wholly lacking in any charisma.  Even if you are familiar with classic Hollywood pictures from forties and fifties, you won't recognize anyone in this movie.  Furthermore, at times, the constraints of the very low budget are sometimes visible in the mise-en-scene which is allusive and elliptical so as to avoid putting anything on-screen that would cost too much money.  This can result in spectacular effects -- for instance, the use of color to suggest violence and chaos in the climactic siege scene in which many shots are bathed in an infernal red glow.  But, in other instances, this way of filming seems overtly threadbare.  The movie is distinctly inferior to Lewton's great works a decade earlier but it is serviceable -- not great by any means, but reasonably entertaining and cleverly designed.  Lewton's films were typically shot in two weeks -- some of them were made on a ten day schedule -- and, so, a lot of what you see is covering for deficiencies in the production.  

The archetypes are thick on the ground in Apache Drums.  A tiny hamlet plopped into the middle of bone-white, waterless desert is becoming civilized.  The sheriff and mayor is a burly stiff, the town's blacksmith whom we see with hammer and anvil.  The sheriff with the ladies in the village reckons that he will clean up the town.  He expels the village's charismatic professional gambling man, an ambiguous character named Sam Leed but called "Sam Slick", by the townsfolk.  Sam isn't happy about his ouster, particularly since he's in love with virtuous local "school-marm" -- although this character doesn't teach school but instead works as a waitress at the town's boarding house and restaurant; she is, however, always clad in white or light pastel colors exemplifying her virtue and is the prudish, responsible "school-marm type."  Sam proposes to the girl and asks her to accompany him on his life of vice.  She rejects him. She's also been keeping company with the blacksmith who would be a better husband, but lacks the "bad boy appeal" of the mustachioed gambler.  The blacksmith with a committee of town elders, including a rabid preacher-man, confront the village's "Jezebels", a company of about six gorgeous prostitutes who have somehow been marooned in this jerkwater, desert hamlet.  (It seems that about half the women in this town of about 18 people are whores.)  The villagers buy-out the prostitutes and they gladly depart the barren and impoverished hamlet -- it's called Spanish Boot.  As a background to these transactions, all efficiently displayed in the film's first 8 or nine minutes, the Mescalero Apaches led by the war-chief Victorio are on a rampage -- they have crossed the Mexican border into Arizona territory and are hellbent on killing the White settlers.  (The Apaches are depicted as colorful demons in the movie, but a couple of titles at the outset establishes in obligatory fashion that they have been oppressed and are starving; therefore, their cause is just although their methods questionable).  Of course, the prostitutes end up strewn all over the desert likewilting floral corsages in their impressive Victorian dresses and corsets and the Apaches knock over their little surrey with its fringe on top.  The gambler, on his way out of town, finds the dead whores, as well as the town's one Black man named Jehu; he's been scalped alive and is still conscious when Sam finds him fallen up against a wagon-wheel.  In typical Lewton fashion, the film understands that what we don't see is more alarming than what is actually depicted on-screen.  Jehu is wearing a beaver top hat and he warns Sam not to remove the cap since the Indians "have taken my hair."  Jehu dies and Sam hightails it back to town to warn the good folks of Spanish Boot -- but, of course, his motive is to humiliate the blacksmith sheriff who exiled him and win the girl.  As he returns to Spanish Boot with about 60 Apaches hot on his trail, Sam encounters a column of cavalry pointlessly patrolling the bleak desert -- they are looking for the Apaches and intervene to save Sam from their raiding party.  Back at Spanish Boot, a young buck is dispatched to the Fort to summon help.  The Apaches kill him and dump his corpse in the town's only well, poisoning the water.  (All of this is effectively suggested but not shown -- the action is all off-screen.)  The townspeople send a wagon out to a nearby river to get some water in barrels.  The Apaches attack and there's a perfunctory battle.  The fanatical Welsh preacherman turns out to be handy with a pistol and with Sam hunkered down in a dry buffalo wallow, the two men hold off the Indians.  The climax of the movie is the siege, a startling sequence that has a running time of about a quarter of the movie -- I think the picture is about ninety minutes long.  The townspeople take refuge in an old Spanish church and bar the door.  It's nighttime and the Apaches attack  through windows located about 10 feet off the floor, little openings through which the colorfully dressed savages hurl themselves to assault the besieged townspeople.  The Indians call for a short truce and ask that a doctor be sent out to treat the war chief Victorio who has been badly wounded.  The brave blacksmith volunteers for this duty and pretends to be a medic.  Apparently, he's not too effective in this ruse because an Apache runs him through with a lance and he dies on the floor of the church thereby eliminating the romantic triangle.  The Indians, then, set the shacks in the town on fire and redouble their assault, leaping acrobatically through the high clerestory windows only to be gunned down as they plunge down into the church.  The Apaches, then, light the church's door on fire.  The defenders stack pews and hymnals in burning doorway to create a threshold of fire over which the Indians can't advance.  The end is near.  The preacherman tells the women and children to prepare for death.  Then, at the last minute, the cavalry arrives and, within 90 seconds, the movie is over.  

The film is notable for the siege sequence which is flamboyant, even, operatic and has been cited as an influence on John Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 which involves a similar siege of police in their precinct stationhouse.  (Assault on Precinct 13, however, is modeled on Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo.)  Apache Drums uses an interesting technique that I haven't noticed often in films, a horror movie trope that aligns the picture with Lewton's earlier work in this genre.  In an early scene, the camera shows us a plume of dust rising over the desert -- the Apaches are approaching but none of the characters in the shot seem to notice the conspicuous evidence of their attack.  Similarly, at the film's climax, the Indians set the wooden door to the church afire -- the camera shows us the flames penetrating the door but the defenders don't react immediately:  the audience sees the threat many seconds before it is noticed by the characters.  Finally, at the climax, the budget has reached its limit and the rescue of the besieged townspeople by the Cavalry all occurs offscreen.  Once again, the cavalry's presence is announced by bugle calls signaling a charge -- something we hear long before the imperiled characters learn that they have been saved.  There's a mythic element to the movie:  Just as the townsfolk take action to eliminate lawlessness in their community, there is the "return of the repressed" in the form of the gaudy and vengeful marauders.