“The Father” -Whose life is it, anyway? [MOVIE REVIEW]
“The Father,” a trip down no-memory lane, started life as one of Florian Zeller’s character plays. This powerful piece focusing on the steep descent into dementia has been brought to the screen in a translation by Christopher Hampton, with the screenplay written by Hampton and Zeller featuring Zeller in his directorial debut. Like the other Zeller plays I have seen, The Mother and Height of the Storm, “The Father” was written as a tour de force usually focusing on one person. Actors are always eager to perform in his plays because of the power and pyrotechnics of his characters. Audiences have a more mixed reaction, which is sometimes the case in this film, because he writes very little structure to frame the story. I do believe he is deliberate in this but it does cause a bit of frustration because it pulls focus from the central dilemma. In this case, an elderly man who is confused in time and sequence has lost his sense of the familiar. Placing the viewer within the mind of the main character, Anthony, we are on his roller coaster as he dissolves into an imagination that sees his daughter Anne first as one person then as another. The men to whom she may or may not have been…
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