‘Familiar’: Tallinn Review

Dir: Calin Peter Netzer. Romania/France/Taiwan. 2023. 106mins

Dragoş Binder (Emanuel Parvu), a film director in his forties, is researching a movie based on his parents’ lives during the turbulent early 1980s in Romania, and subsequently Germany. But the more that he discovers, the more his already strained relationship with his father and mother deteriorates. The latest film from Calin Peter Netzer is an abrasive and at times deeply uncomfortable character study of a damaged man who is nearly impossible to like.

Bravely unconcerned with winning the audience’s approval. 

This is the fifth film from Netzer, whose previous pictures include the Berlin Golden Bear-winning Child’s Pose (2013); Ana, My Love, which picked up the Berlin Silver Bear in 2017; and Medal Of Honour (2009) which won multiple festival prizes. Like Child’s Pose, this film has at its heart a complicated and uneasy mother-son relationship, but Familiar lacks the thematic universality of Netzer’s other films. It is a uniquely Romanian story, and as such, it is likely to connect most successfully with domestic audiences.

There may be an autobiographical element to this picture but, one hopes, not too much of an overlap between Metzer and his violent, hot-tempered, emotionally manipulative protagonist. Both Netzer and Dragos belong to the Transylvanian Saxon minority, an ethnically German community that has lived in Romania for generations. Like those of Dragos, Netzer’s parents – his father first and then his mother – moved to Stuttgart in Germany in the early 1980s to avoid the repressive excesses of Nicolae Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime.

Dragos’ plan to make a film based on his parents’ lives requires their collaboration – it’s the only way for Dragos to gain access to the recently declassified secret files that were kept by the Securitate about the citizens of Romania. Unfortunately, Dragos’ mother Valentina (Ana Ciontea) claims not to remember anything about the period, and his father Emil (Adrian Titieni) rages at his son, accusing him of being a talentless parasite and worse. Dragos can give as good as he gets however, and returns the old man’s verbal attack with a physical one. This disconcerting scene is shot, like most of the film, with an edgy hand-held camera. And it leaves us with no doubt about the extent of the rot at the heart of Dragos’ family relationships.

Before he embarked on his research, Dragos already knew that Valentina had an affair in the early 80s with a man called Harald Stern (Vlad Ivanov). It’s a fact that uses like a stick with which to beat his mother, his recriminations spewing out whenever his temper boils over (frequently). But Dragos fails to admit to himself that he, too, takes the role of adulterer in a love triangle composed of himself, his newly pregnant model girlfriend Alina (Victoria Moraru) and his ex, Ilinca (Iulia Lumanare, who co-wrote the screenplay with Netzer), with whom he is collaborating on the research for the film.

The film’s naturalistic approach – there’s no score, and a documentary-style agility to the camerawork – means that the picture relies on the quality of the performances, which are strong throughout and bravely unconcerned with winning the audience’s approval. Netzer uses split screens and reflections within the frame to emphasise the key message: when it comes to family, there are numerous parallel truths and perspectives.