oh, dad!

“And When Have You Last Seen Your Father?” (Anand Tucker, 2007)

…a difficult question to be asked as you approach the age of thirty,or forty because either you’ve left home long ago and life now reserves too little time to remember the old folks, or the memory of a young and present dad- a real dad!- is under a thick layer of dust. Have you ever seen him really? What do know about his life before you? Maybe a couple of photos with army chums and one in which his head is fully covered in curly hair. Just an opportunity to laugh, imagine further and reminiscence… or maybe you can grasp the real him in the gaze of mom. If they’re still together after all these years, it must have been love! Or habituation? Or the fear to lose a home?

There comes a time when they get old, when they make us come back and want to get to know them as adults, to interpret their mistakes through cynical adult eyes. Would you rather confront them than take care of them? You have some pieces of the puzzle from back in adolescence: it was impossible for him to be faithful while mom was resilient for the kids. He was often the heart of the party in public and nothing but a grump in private. But still, he taught you how to drive, took you camping and bought you your first beer. But then again, he always criticized you, made the worst jokes on your behalf and was still far from being content with your achievements.

Anand Tucker’s film speaks to the moment in your life when you realize you’ve gone a long separate way since that umbilical cord was cut. So long that it takes a journey into childhood to reconnect with the old people who live at your former address. What was so good and what was so awful about them? How did you come to hate one of them?
Colin Firth faultlessly plays Blake, an awarded writer who visits the house of his parents to spend the last days with his dying father. The sad event gives him the opportunity to make up with the grim memories he had of the dad- a cheating personality, “minor duplicities, little fiddles”, lack of empathy, or the constant desire to impress and to be liked, on account of others. Although knowledgeable of having been cheated throughout their marriage, the old mom (Juliet Stevenson) does not cease to be at her husband’s side. As his strength leaves his body into being spoon-fed, he rewards her with pathetic hypocrite moments of “I don’t know what I would have done without you.” Blake is about to make the mistake of being sucked into memories of his first love- a sharp-tongued lassy maid in his family’s house during his adolescence- and forget about his wife and kids. Their arrival after the death of the father and the attempt to reconcile with his aunt (the one he suspects to have been his dad’s lifelong mistress) brings him back to present life. There he finds space to accept the dad that passed away as a faulty person, but as a real dad- one whose memory he can squeeze to his chest, one whose ashes he ritually tastes.

Imdb rating: 6.8