Film Review of The Father directed by Florian Zeller: Fragility of Human and the World of Dementia

The Father is directed by Florian Zeller, bases on his play Le Père written in 2012. The story of the movie is simply about the life of Anthony (starring Anthony Hopkins), who has dementia, and his middle-aged daughter, Anne (Starring Olivia Colman). The Le Père won the Molière Award for Best Play in 2014 and was then performed worldwidely. In Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Repertory Theatre (HKREP) performed this play in 2017 and 2019, receiving much good critic, and scheduled the play again in May 2021. I watched the performance of HKREP in 2017 and loved the play so much.

The Father starts with Anne visiting Anthony as he refused being looked after by caretakers employed by Anne. At the beginning, everything seems to be quite normal, Anthony seems to be an ordinarily forgetful old man. However, on the next day, Anthony suddenly saw an unknown man sitting in the living room and claiming to be the husband of Anne. The more surprising was that Anne is totally a different woman who Anthony cannot recognize. 

The subsequent scenes are, appearing to Anthony, in a distortion, distortion of time or people that he was not able to understand where and when he was at, and all he could rely on was the watch on his wrist that didn't change throughout the whole movie. Audience may be as confusing as Anthony at the beginning but will be able to collect all the pieces, form the actual timeline and solve out all the mysteries. During the movie, the audiences are experiencing the confusing and scary feeling of a person having dementia, i.e. there is no more something reliable in life to grasp on anymore. At the end of the movie, Anne left Anthony in a nursing house and moved to Paris with her lover. Anthony woke up one day, could not remember anything about that and thus came to an emotional breakdown, suddenly crying and longing to see his mother again. Anthony cried in the end:

" I feel as if I'm losing all my leaves......The branches and the wind and the rain. I don't know what's happening anymore...…All this business about the flat, I have nowhere to put my head anymore."

And as a human, a mortal being like Anthony, we somehow wonder that such problem will appear in our life soon or later while watching the movie, either we may be Anne or Anthony. We may have to take care our parents with dementia, face the conflict between our lives and the duty, and have make some tough choices. Or we may be Anthony one day, mixing up all the memory and people, and in the worst case being left alone finally.

It sounds cruel but this is the fragility of human that is not inevitably.  

Hopkins achieved recognition already in many films such as the Silence of the Lambs and the two Popes, his acting skill is not doubtable. Hopkins, this time, did an excellent performance in The Father and I think he probably will win the Best Actor in Oscar 2021. Hopkins was able to express the pride of the character, as once being an engineer, at the beginning of the movie and how the pride with rationality of a man were slowly destroyed by the mental sickness throughout the movie. The character is not robotic, he laughs, he gets angry, he is confused, he cries, etc. He sometime is talkative and sometime falls into silence. All these facets combine well together to form a real person on the screen and we all are situated in a world of this old man with dementia, Anthony.

Rating: 4/5