“With two young actors showing great talent and good work behind the camera, including Peijnenburg’s assured direction, there is enough to recommend this film.”

Custody battles can get ugly. Just look at the one that Mees Peijnenburg’s second feature A Family revolves around. Peijnenburg, a regular in Berlin’s Generation 14plus section (several of his shorts played there, as well as his debut feature-length film Paradise Drifters), mostly focuses on the children and the way the war raging over their heads affects them. A Family doesn’t exactly re-invent the wheel, not even by switching perspectives on the events in the story, but it is a solid family drama with emerging acting talent complemented by two seasoned veterans, and this is the kind of film that will play well on the social realism-hungry arthouse scene.

Jacob (Pieter Embrechts) and Maria (Carice van Houten) are going through a stormy divorce. The main point of contention: who gets the kids? But that is a decision Nina (Celeste Holsheimer) and Eli (Finn Vogels) will have to make for themselves, which is very difficult. Nina would rather not have to deal with either of her parents, no matter how hard both are angling for a sign of her affection. The girl turns inwards and reclusive, focusing on practicing a routine with the dance troupe she is part of. Her own relationship, with another teen girl who does have a harmonious family, suffers under the pressure of having to make a choice between Jacob and Maria, the people she blames for losing her own harmony.

Eli meanwhile would rather see everything return to the way it was, as impossible as that seems. He too becomes isolated, and also has a surrogate ‘family’ he turns to in his swim club, much like Nina has her dance mates. When he becomes the center of a big argument in which Jacob lies to Maria about being ill so he can go to a party with his swimming friends, Eli reaches breaking point. The conflict between their parents drives the two siblings apart, but just in time both sides realize that the other has been struggling with the same issues, and that they have each other to build on even if their desires are diametrically opposed.

A Family is a tale of two halves, which focuses first on Nina and her world and struggles, then halfway through switches to Eli and does the same with him. Sometimes these timelines intersect, and we get to see the same events from two different viewpoints, but Peijnenburg doesn’t illustrate the differences between those moments in terms of interpretation very sharply, which makes the film lose the main reason for this structural choice. A Family is stronger when the focus lies solely on either Nina or Eli, and the way they handle the fighting between their parents and how Jacob and Maria approach them, because that is where the main differences are. As the older child, Nina gets far more flak from her parents, in particular from Maria (the way van Houten’s character grows irate over even the slightest perceived injustice is a sign of how poorly written her character is; why any kid would want to live with her is a mystery). Eli, on the other hand, receives far more loving treatment, even when he becomes part of a major conflict between his parents.

With Maria and, to a lesser extent, Jacob being one-dimensional characters, it falls to Holsheimer and Vogels to give the film texture and nuance. Both succeed with flying colors. Holsheimer in particular announces herself as a major talent, having to convey the range of emotions in her character’s head mostly through darting eyes and tense body language, as the dejected Nina often falls silent under the pressure of her predicament. The younger Vogels manages to do the same, perhaps not with the finesse of his ‘film sister’, but when Eli breaks down in an emotional scene towards the end the young actor shows his massive talent.

DoP Jasper Wolf delivers reliably strong work as always, often employing a shallow depth-of-field to emphasize the isolation and closed-off state of the two main characters. The compositional work is on point, even though it involves many close-ups in order to render the emotions on the actors’ faces, since verbally both characters are somewhat lost for words in the messy situation their parents have saddled them with. The film doesn’t really resolve this situation, but it does bring the siblings together, which is a closure in its own right. With a bit more nuanced writing of the parents’ roles, A Family as a film about the strength of familial ties and the effect that breaking those ties has on the emotional balance of the children involved could have achieved a bigger impact, but with two young actors showing great talent and good work behind the camera, including Peijnenburg’s assured direction, there is enough to recommend this film.

(c) Image copyright: Jasper Wolf