There are unlikely to be many wakes where mourners are privy to the sort of exchange that takes place towards the end of In Memory Of My Father. In a moment which typifies the feature’s satisfying flippancy and warped logic, recently bereaved Chris (the film’s writer, director and star –Jaymes), defends his decision to give seventeen year old Christine (Larkin )Rohypnol when she ‘thought it was ecstasy’: ‘they’re kinda similar’. Touché.
These sorts of wakes are few and far between, unless you happen to know a dying film legend who has requested that the immediate aftermath of their demise be documented on video. This macabre task is left in the hands of post-juvenile delinquent Chris and his brothers Jeremy (Sisto) and Matt (Keeslar). Unwilling to let grief get in the way of exposition Jaymes doesn’t allow his characters to shed so much as a snivel for the old man. Everyone is all far too busy thinking about themselves. This is, after all, the director’s critique of what he calls ‘the illusory arena that composes the core of young Hollywood’.
Thankfully the film is neither as vapid nor as self-interested as its protagonists. From the moment Dad’s shopaholic, primal screaming trophy girlfriend (Greer) stumbles into the filmshoot-cum-funeral Jaymes’ Altmanesque lens is off on a blackly comic whistle-stop tour of Los-Angeles’ maladies. Ex-girlfriends, lesbian wives, soft drugs, hard drugs, indecent proposals and proposed indecencies all float along on a wave of documentary style film making and badly mixed metaphors. It could all have gone horribly wrong, but thanks to some hugely believable comic performances – including Pat (Healey), the perpetually histrionic best friend - it all goes horribly right.
It’s not that the film is monstrously original. In Memory Of My Father could well be the slightly-stoned younger brother of the Dogme classic Festen (1998). It’s the film Thomas Winterberg would have made if all his dour Danes had had their brains addled by too much West-Coast Sunshine. Where Festen relied on tension and repressed secrets Jaymes’ motley crew refuse to keep anything to themselves for more than five minutes. There is no dark secret lurking below the radar to pull the family asunder, just the unceasing West LA engine of sex, lies and videotape. As the film progresses audiences will wonder whether there is anything at all that these characters cannot overcome with the aid of a barney, a beer and a bong. Indeed it is this ability to transcend trauma through sheer self-interestedness that proves more disturbing than any of the character’s misadventures.
The film is too painfully self-aware to get caught up in its own characters’ clichéd interactions. Instead it presents us with an army of narcissists, not simply gazing at their reflections but actively engaged in amusingly un-winnable arguments with their own egos on the niceties sex and space-time. Yet in spite of itself In Memory Of My Father manages to display a myriad of touching moments where these narcissi get up from their respective pools for a group hug. Perhaps not a perfect sentiment but, like the film itself, it’s as good as ‘young Hollywood’ gets.
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IN MEMORY OF MY FATHER