Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr, 2023).
“You can’t always trust photographs,” may just be one line out of many in Lucy Kerr’s decisively polyphonous Family Portrait (2023). It is also a meta-statement encapsulating the film’s source of narrative tensions—that glaze of artificiality over every family portrait ever taken. Kerr’s debut feature stars Deragh Campbell (Anne at 13,000 Feet, 2019) as the protagonist, Katy. She and her boyfriend, Olek (Chris Galust), are the youngest couple in Katy’s big family—not to mention unmarried and childless—which makes them undeclared outsiders. There is no dramatic reason for them to be so eager to leave the holiday home, and yet they should get going. It’s late morning. The breakfast is lavish, with just the right amount of chaotic buzz. Olek is tasked with taking a family portrait, which will become this year’s Christmas card, but something feels off. Tensions mount as whispers of a recently deceased cousin carry across the room one exchange at a time. Shortly after sharing the tragic news, the matriarch, Barbara (Silvana Jakich), disappears from view, not to return for the remainder of the film. Relatives scatter, and the portrait is put on hold, to Katy’s dismay. Gathering everyone in one place now seems an impossible task, time distends, and the absence of her mother is somehow distressing to Katy alone.
Kerr’s debut feature, which had its world premiere at the 2023 Locarno Film Festival, beckons you to step into a world of intense love and longing. Instead of untangling these familial knots, caress them. The film opens with an epigraph from Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Conqueror Worm” which describes the closed loop of a circle, fated to return “to the self-same spot.” But the main shape that Family Portrait emulates is a spiral: always ascending, always changing, and never closing its loop. If we see the shape as a symbol of non-linear transformation, then maybe it is possible to find liberation in its repetitive nature. The family Christmas card, loaded with significance, sits at the center of this film’s spiral. There is something ritualistic about every holiday gathering: a family reconvenes in the same place; a home becomes a sanctuary for sense-memory. An annual portrait captures that sameness as much as it marks change, a record of a family growing up and growing old.
Instead of vesting a ritual with a salubrious purpose—to temporarily organize chaos into order—Lucy Kerr tells me at Locarno that she sees it as “a way to make meaning in a meaningless world, trying to hold on to something.” Similarly, intimacy is to be found in the least likely of places, even in the absence of a loved one. By omitting the matriarch without any further explanation, the film lays bare the messy dynamics of one family to evoke universal truths: however convoluted and indecipherable, these relationships have a gravitational pull. The mother-daughter bond at the heart of the film is kept ambiguous on purpose. While Katy’s anxiety and loneliness only grow as she keeps asking after Barbara to no avail, she is also trying to restore that togetherness reserved for the photographic ritual.
As a result, Katy’s attempts to wrangle her relatives amount to a kind of mystagogy, and Family Portrait is more about yearning for connection than it is about familial unease. The idea of a shared rite of passage, guided by Katy, resonates with Kerr’s description of the film’s chronotope as “purgatory, almost.” She locates the gathering’s ritualistic aspects in the group’s “inability to take a picture and move forward because they simply can't process their loss together, as a family. They are unable to mourn, and so they lose themselves in a melancholic loop.” It’s up to Katy to turn the loop into a spiral, so there is room to breathe.
Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr, 2023).
Having grown up in a big family herself, with three sisters and six nieces and nephews, Kerr attests she is very familiar with the fluctuating energy levels of such gatherings, the repressive mechanisms at play, and how emotions are filtered through the image that all is well and good. The film never announces its location—it was shot in Hunt, Texas, amid the verdant forests and lakes of the Hill Country—but Kerr singles out a few regional references that speak to the bigger picture. The logo of Pennzoil, an oil company headquartered in Houston, appears in the background of one scene, pointing to histories of extraction that are “uniquely Texas, uniquely American: this repression of American violence, or covering up the history of that violence.”
Filming took place around a compound of family cottages on the north fork of the Guadalupe River. “My experience of being [Katy] is completely bound to being in that place,” Campbell remembers when we speak at the festival. “I was staying nearby, down the river, and on my way to set I kept seeing all these ‘Private Property’ signs. If you were to canoe down the river, you wouldn’t be able to stop and get off anywhere. Then, I realized how the ways people defend their property show it’s not intrinsically theirs.” The film’s sense of place is constructed again and again through constant negotiation of the family’s dynamics, rather than anchored in a pre-established collective belonging. Katy’s darting eyes and brisk walking in search of her mother tell us something about how unmoored her sense of home is.
Kerr's background as a choreographer informs her approach to blocking and framing: in addition to her own avant-garde performances made for art spaces, she works as a movement director for fashion and music videos. “You have to develop a relationship with the space around you,” she says. “Even if you end up not dominating it, you are mastering it through your own body.” Her two previous works, the short films Crashing Waves (2021) and Site of Passage (2022), explore the ambivalent relationship between gestures and images in different contexts and her brand of corporeal expressionism is evident throughout. For Family Portrait, Kerr worked with Rob Rice as directorial advisor and co-producer sculpting the scenes together and forming “a landscape of bodies,” as she calls it, so that the film might resemble “a ritual of crossing over from the world of the living to death, and back.”
Katy’s neurotic pacing and the impatience informing her every move are only two elements of this dynamic canvas: most of the time, people slide in and out of the frame without drawing the camera’s attention. More than a practical necessity, the precise choreography of the opening and closing sequences especially, mirrored by the use of Steadicam, allows room for emotion to swell and rise out of a body as an aura. What shines through their short-lived interactions (holding hands and letting go, touching one’s shoulder, the turn of a head as one passes by) are the varying degrees of attention they show to one another, mirrored by the camera’s gliding movement and brief pauses. Elsewhere, a static set-up allows time for a scene to unfold through gestures, as in a close-up of Barbara showing Olek a hefty family album just before disappearing. She flicks through the pages, revealing old Christmas cards, and when she sways out of the frame, leaving him with the book, Katy plunges forward, toward the camera, throwing her body over the pages. At that moment, according to Campbell, Katy’s body is saying, “I cannot hold this idea together anymore,” letting go of the notion that her family is without its troubles. In such instances, Family Portrait moves nimbly between the macro scale of the family-façade’s collapse and the micro scale of a person toppling over.
Family Portrait (Lucy Kerr, 2023).
As the film’s tone intensifies, the camera, emancipated from the Steadicam set-up, begins to move more freely and the sound crescendos. The choreography of bodies dictates the flow of each scene, but the film also traces a subtler choreography of glances. As Katy restlessly moves through rooms and exterior spaces, her eyes flit about, searching for something to hold on to. There is also the silent familial gaze, which ricochets from one person to the next. They all know each other so well that they feel immediately familiar to a viewer, too, without any introductions. The film withholds judgment and avoids didacticism so that it can speak to ineffable tensions; as Tolstoy wrote, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” By anchoring the film in this muted crossfire, Kerr proposes an alternative narrative structure, relying equally on the unsaid and the unseen.
Kerr is drawn to those aspects of interpersonal encounters that go beyond the visible, and seeks to evoke the ways that emotions can linger even when there is no vessel to hold them. “The offscreen is why I fell in love with film,” says Kerr, “and image-making is very important for my work, but so is the gap between the body and its image.” Katy’s quest to retrieve her mother is full of emotional cues that rely on everything else but words—some are locked in hand gestures, others in Campbell’s downward cadence that dissolves into silence—reminding us that intimacy can be found in expression and repression alike. Campbell describes acting as “a weird, emotional mathematics where it isn't just incurring wounds, or incurring wounds as another person. It very often, at its best, can be a release.” She describes that process of rehearsing, repeating, in a quasi-mystical way, a situation that at first “feels like nothing, until it doesn’t”; a performance can be thought of as an expression conjured from the actor.
While Campbell doesn’t make a conscious effort to break down the distance between herself and her character, she does look for entry points to start from, a trait or disposition in which she can recognize herself. She firmly believes that the actor “is not the sole author of a character.” Just as it’s impossible to fully understand another person, a performer cannot fully inhabit every aspect of a character’s personality. Still, Campbell’s portrayal of Katy does not alienate the viewer, nor does it render her unknowable. We get to know her in terms of what she's unable to do: to reach her mother, and, further, to articulate all that's left unsaid in her family. “Rather than building something, [Lucy and I] were more interested in deconstructing it,” she adds.
The absurd task of searching and asking after her mother turns frightening for Katy, her inquiries met only with peculiar disinterest and dismay. Just as in a child’s nightmare, everyone else seems unperturbed. Barbara has disappeared not only from the physical world, but also from the memories of all of her family members. To counter this threat of annihilation, Family Portrait builds up to a mystical space of respite. Toward the film’s end, mother and daughter finally share the same frame, just the two of them. Although it’s left ambiguous whether this scene is real or imagined, what matters is that, on a rock in the river, they are “intrinsically together,” in Campbell’s words. Here, cinematographer Lydia Nikonova also makes use of material she was lucky to catch on camera: a shot of two birds on the same rock, which invites a metaphorical interpretation of the sequence.
The scene is a silent culmination of that yearning for a space where they can be together, “without society or the constraints of time,” in a snippet of almost utopian intimacy. “We know that that kind of togetherness exists between us all,” adds Campbell, “and yet, for the most part, can never be accessed because of the many things obstructing it. It will never be possible, but somehow it is.”