SIFF #1: Four Mothers, Invention
Two early festival highlights touch on the dangers of the Reel World.
For the second year in a row now, SIFF has opened with a comedy whose pleasures are rooted in our relationships with the elderly. The choice of an apparent crowd-pleaser is fitting for an edition whose tagline, “Escape to the Reel World”, glancingly refers to the psuedo-dystopian state of the nation. As SIFF presumably faces its own set of crises, whether they be related to federal grant funding or the closure of the Egyptian, this year’s festival is framed as a respite, an invitation to lose oneself in the enveloping world of the cinema.
Given that statement of purpose, Darren Thornton’s Four Mothers is actually an interesting tone-setter, since its merits are rooted in its critiques of “let people enjoy things” escapism. As insane as it feels to type this sentence out, Four Mothers is something of a postmodern Netflix Original, cannily using the tonality and visual language of Heartstopper-esque content to call attention to the substance smothered by format’s oppressive sentiment.
At the center of the Ireland-set Four Mothers is Edward, a pathological people-pleaser who finds himself caught in a maelstrom of expectations. A single, 30-something gay man, Edward takes care of his mother, who recently suffered a stroke and requires around the clock care. One weekend, his friends, who are in similar caretaking positions and knowingly abuse Edward’s inability to say no, depart for Maspalomas Pride, leaving all of their mothers under his responsibility. The timing is unfortunate as Edward, an author whose newly-released novel has gone viral on Booktok, is handling pressure from his publishers to embark on a book tour in the United States.
As previously mentioned, most of the film plays as easy viewing, relishing in the four mothers’ quippy one-liners and a sort of masochistic glee as Edward submits to one ridiculous demand after another. Thornton’s script is notable for its avoidance of confrontation, often using an old-person joke to cut short discussion of the characters’ troubled pasts or in some cases, even cutting to black before what may seem like a climactic plot point. As a result, the film is incredibly direct about issues such as the material and existential struggles of being a middle-aged gay man, a survivor of abuse, or a woman living in 20th-century Ireland, but those more impassioned statements exist in the film’s negative space, fenced out by the generic reality of, say, one of the mothers falling asleep.
Edward faces a similar predicament in his artistic practice. As he hops on interviews about his novel, which covers a turbulent gay relationship over the span of 10 years, he repeatedly receives feedback that no one wants to hear about the novel’s intentions as anti-romance, or its metaphorical resonance as a portrait of Ireland’s colonial scars. They just want to hear about his influences and fit his work within a more palatable definition of gay life. Thornton is referential to the point of satire, naming every bookstore and podcast that Edward participates in, offering comparisons so disparate they simply can’t cohere (a New York Times review, for example, compares Edward to Faulkner while the social media fanfare surrounding the novel makes it sound like Song of Achilles). In one of the more direct references to media’s perpetuation of the status quo, Edward and his friends even name the exact Netflix content they’re showing their mothers to pacify them (in retrospect, this is like the modern version of the TV sets in All That Heaven Allows).
Four Mothers ultimately reveals the oppressive nature of normality. Just as elderly stereotype silences Edward, and his caricature-esque friends escape their troubles (Edward describes them all as homeless, jobless, lonely, depressed, and traumatized) by indulging in a made-for-straight-audiences version of gay life, complete with a definition of bears (“you know, like, hairy gay men”), the four mothers rationalize the behavior of their late partners, which included beatings and fights, as a sign of the times. In the shot-on-iPhone end credits, Thornton turns the perpetual journey for authenticity into a literal reframing of the image.
Similarly ambivalent about the cinematic image is Courtney Stephens’ impressive narrative debut, Invention. Stephens has made a name for herself over the past decade or so directing avant-docs and acting as the lead in Jon Davies’ Rivette-ian experimental music mystery Topology of Sirens. Invention draws from the former in its auto-fictional premise and its interest in the porous line between fantasy and reality, while the kinship to the latter is present in the film’s ambient existentialism and wry sense of humor.
A collaboration between Stephens and lead actress Callie Hernandez, Invention is inspired by the pair’s shared experience of losing their fathers. Hernandez’s father was a homeopathic health specialist who frequently appeared on cable talk shows throughout the late 90s and early 2000s. A proponent of numerous conspiracy theories who was also unvaccinated, he passed away during the pandemic.
Liberally using snippets of her father’s archival footage, Hernandez plays a version of herself, Carrie Fernandez, navigating the bereavement process. At the outset of the film, she’s given a patent to her father’s recalled magical invention, an electromagnetic machine which attunes patients’ cells to healing frequencies. That the machine is a metaphor for the cinema is an unavoidable comparison, and Invention functions as Carrie’s initiation into the unreality of fiction. Most of this consists of a series of low-fi hangouts as Carrie meets her fathers business partners and patients. Shot in 16mm and performed in a dry, semi-improvisational style, Stephens and Hernandez strike a fantastic tonal balance between intrigue, grief, and kitschy absurdist comedy. It consistently looks and sounds fantastic, in no small part due to the beguiling musicality of Stephens’ montage. In an unexpected, but fitting comparison, Invention frequently tips its hat to Tarkovsky’s Solaris, and through its sensorial riches, embodies the intersection between grief and the seductive danger of fantasy.
Four Mothers and Invention played at the 51st Seattle International Film Festival, taking place in person May 15-25 and online May 26 - June 1. Tickets are available here.