Review by
Benjamin Poole
Directed by: António Sequeira
Starring: Beatriz Frazão, Elsa Valentim, Miguel Frazão, Salvador Gil
I've referred to the eternally apposite Anna Karenina principle many and
oft in these missives but considering Antonio Sequeira's Portuguese
coming of age oddity Autumn, here's a slight amendment to Tolstoy's
aphorism: "All happy families are alike; each family is weird in its own
way." Because they really are. My little nephew is at the age where he
has sleepovers, along with all concurrent tears and fears concerning
staying over at the homes of other families. And I think it's not the
anxiety of being away from home which is upsetting so much as it is the
abruptly developing awareness that other houses are a foreign country
and they do things differently there, with their strict bedtime
guidelines, in-jokes and disparate table etiquette: a distressing
microcosm which relates to a world at large that is increasingly
unknowable. Although Sequeira's immersive study of a família perhaps
does not explicitly invite subjective juxtaposition, watching its
bespoke construction of the domestic unit you cannot help but consider
the singular strangeness of families and the standards which we hold
them to.
In Autumn this perspective is encouraged by, well, just how bizarre the
family in question are. We open with central figure Tomás (Salvador Gil,
slightly stretched Aaron Taylor-Johnson circa Kick-Ass) bopping around
his room while packing a suitcase to retro music, connoting his callow
youth. An initial stumbling block is that Tomás looks a little older
than a kid about to leave to go to university overseas, an inconvenience
not aided by this Gen Z lad quoting Taxi Driver to the mirror, a film
that was released half a century ago. His parents across the house
attempt some mid-morning nookie but are interrupted when Tomás screams
that he has lost his bongos (yes, he's one of those). It is perhaps
important to note that the heavy petting follows on from father Otávio
(Miguel Frazão, a Portuguese John Holmes, in keeping with the retro
bricolage) worrying that in a forthcoming medical some "f****t" is going
to handle his genitalia. Later he will make sweeping comments about
black men at the dinner table, and after that cause further racially
motivated foot-in-mouth embarrassment when Tomás' mid-narrative
girlfriend stays for a holiday. The film presents his bigotry as
harmless, even humorous, guile. Families, eh?
Perhaps there is mitigation in the family's unworldly circumstance.
Otávio is a vintner, with the familial vineyard set deep in the
Portuguese countryside; a location exemplified by an on the nose
pastoral opening shot of a man crossing a sleepy train track with a
sheep, the golden backdrop snoozing in gorgeous panorama (Autumn really
is a pretty film to look at). It is understandable why Tomás wants to
jettison this sequestered lifestyle for cosmopolitan London (although
anyone watching who lives in contemporary Britain would be willing him
to stay in his relative paradise), igniting the narrative trigger and
enabling the film's themes of time, bildungsroman and empty nest
syndrome. Before the poignancy, however, Autumn's first act is jolly,
with the family carelessly grape stomping en masse for a laugh ("this
wine is going to taste gross!") and then, most egregiously, Tomás
forcefully insisting that his mother Susana (Elsa Valentim) and sister Belinha (Beatriz Frazão) join him in an impromptu bop to his
incongruously period pop. In the first instance it is strange that after
a lifetime of having a vinery there would still be giggling novelty in a
familial grape tread, and secondly is there anything worse in the world
than being forced to dance by a show off? The content which Autumn
inadvertently reminded me of most was The Familiegh, the terrifying
social media phenomena comprising of an aged father and adult sons who
dance and smile to songs, maniacally unhindered by decorum.
The conceit is that Tomás revisits every season, with the passing of
time marked by geological disparity and a visually distinct aging up of
the characters, as if years and not months have passed (hence the youth
offensive of the opening sequence, I suppose). With each return the
family grow further apart as children become adults, and the adults grow
older. However, the way in which the divisions manifest is balkingly
tame. Tomás boasts of drinking alcohol (mate, you literally lived on a
vineyard?), has a tattoo so small that dad doesn't notice it for yonks,
and eventually becomes a tiresome atheist in the jejune way of a
precocious pre-teen. Such quotidian ripples don't really convince as
conflict (unlike, I dunno, if Tomás was doing a business degree and came
back with disruptive free market ideas about how to change the business,
say). For the sake of awkward social drama, when Tomás brings his
English-speaking girlfriend home the family behave as if they have never
interacted with a living human being before. Like you see in a
children's film with aliens or a pet robot trying to fit in with humans.
The mother stumbling over English, the father being racist, etc. In his
room Tomás attempts cunnilingus on the poor girl and this too is
interrupted by his wacky folks, creating a motif of botched sex (with
its annoying characters and cringe-inducing familial behaviours, is
Autumn a feature length PSA concerning the potential consequences of
heterosexual couplings?).
This mode plunges a further nadir in Belinha's climactic leaving party
wherein the mother and father seem nonplussed to witness late-teens
drinking with contingent abandon (I stress again that these people are
in the booze business). This sequence attempts catharsis following the
film's narrative shift towards the more interesting characters of Susana
and Belinha, and commentary on the expected roles of women within this
archaic community. Belinha is discouraged from leaving, while Otávio is
implied to be a narcissist in relation to Susana's stoic weathering of
her lot. Otávio's affectations are criticised by the film, but it is
arguable that with its idiosyncratic amplification of the mundane, the
subjective angst of Autumn is equally as vainglorious.
Autumn is on UK/ROI VOD from June 2nd.
