In Memory of My Father

In Memory of My Father serves as the perfect reminder that we should be careful when picking up random films from second hand DVD stores. From the case, the movie looked slightly unhinged, but upon viewing it, it transpired that it had somehow escaped from the lunatic asylum. But by the end, I was deeply in love with it. For a variety of reasons.

All of the following characters are clinically insane

The premise is truly bizarre. A holiday legend (David Austin) has died (Austin excels at being dead). To record this momentous event for posterity, he has bribed his son (Christopher Jaymes, apparently playing himself. If he is, he is a seriously messed up person!) to record his after-death-party. This sets the scene for the bizarre mix of inappropriate/surreal humour and fairly sincere portraits of a variety of relationships breaking down that follow.

It's not a good start. Pat (Pat Healey), one of Chris's equally dreadful siblings, straddles the corpse of his father in order to get a good shot of his face. Dialogue is squeezed in-between frequent uses of the F-word (there does come a point when swearing is overdone) and there is little humour, just strangeness.

But as you acclimatize to the strange ideas of the film it becomes a delight. Chris has seduced a teenage girl, and has to face teasing from his family and friends (legitimately) and his more appropriately longing for Nicole (Nicholle Tom, valiantly performing the duty of crying a lot near the end). Pat is obsessed with his ex (who he only dated for two months), and clearly has anger management issues with the amount of shouting he does. Jeremy (Jeremy Sisto) is dealing with the shocking revelation that his wife is possibly homosexual, and he does this by taking Ecstasy and stumbling around the party with a New Age mystic in dressing gowns. Matt (Matt Keesler) is suffering from OCD (who doesn't fold their socks and underwear???) and is sleeping with his step-mother. After all this, the comment from a character that "no one in this family is capable of a normal relationship" is actually quite founded.

You will either love or hate this film, there's no inbetween. The soundtrack is just as deranged as the rest of the film, created by Belle and Sebastien (one of the songs seems to be about a child being bullied at school). You will get confused by the twisted family relationships (one of them proclaims that his step-mother is also his aunt). There is a strange lack of structure as we flip between the multitude of ill-fated siblings (which gets stranger as we go on, one scene just comprises of Matt telling his step-mother that "your bra matches your eyes"). There are some fantastically surreal scenes, one of my favourites is when Jeremy contemplates jumping into the pool in his dressing gown.

So in the end, I enjoyed my brief trip in to the mind of Christopher Jaymes (writer, director and actor). But I don't think I could stay there much longer without also losing my grip on reality and starting to rock and weep.

Rating: 7/10