A Family Affair (2015) Review

Lucas Versantvoort / 27 Nov 2015

Tom Fassaert, photographer and documentary maker, one day receives an invitation from his 95 year-old grandmother who lives in South Africa. All he knows about her are the misery-filled tales told by his father, her son. Tom visits her and films all their conversations. The result is a mind-boggling portrait of this family and its many ills. 

A Family Affair becomes a meditation on childhood trauma's and how these are carried by its victims their entire lives unless both parties are willing to get together and have a sit-down. Usually, however, the things that need to be said remain unsaid. The tragedy here, which Fassaert shows with utmost clarity, is that Marianne is just unable to do so due to how self-absorbed and narcissistic she is. This is a woman who, being a single mom, put her three year-old sons in an orphanage for (if I remember correctly) the sake of her fashion career, but when told that this was a traumatic experience for them, can't even begin to understand how such an experience might be traumatic. This is someone who when meeting her oldest son (Fassaert's uncle), who ended up in a psychiatric institute in his teens due to his toxic relationship with her, for the first time in years can only seem to speak of her fancy house and backyard back in South Africa. This is someone who falls in love with Fassaert, her grandson mind you, and has to be told by an acquaintance that such a thing could never be before she seems to accept this. This is someone who is unable to, or perhaps emotionally can't afford to, accept the harm she's caused her children and seems to prefer living in the past, when she was a diva and still had her youth.

Nevertheless, Fassaert doesn't fail in drawing out some painful memories from Marianne as well. In a pivotal scene, she reveals to Tom (for the first time in history, she claims) lots of things about her childhood, how she sensed her father appreciated her only because of her looks, how she had to put money on the table as a single mom through modelling, etc. You quickly get a sense of where she's coming from and the transgenerational impact of child-parent relationships and trauma's. 

The crux of the matter, however, is that the tears she sheds during this conversation aren't shed for her sons, but for herself. She never truly atones for the pain she's caused her children nor does she seem really aware of it. And that's the real tragedy: these children (in the sense that they are still 'children') are essentially waiting their entire lives for the Big Talk with their mother, where they all lay their cards on the table, so that they can let the healing can begin. However, Marianne, damaged as she is in her own way, will never be able to meet those demands. 

Fassaert presents all this and more in a wonderfully natural documentary that never devolves into melodrama. It couldn't have been easy, spending five years making this documentary, having been warned by his father to not let himself be fooled by Marianne, this 'expert manipulator'. But the end result isn't just some family melodrama, but a universal cautionary tale to all families, to not let the unspoken remain unspoken.