His Three Daughters ranks among the greatest American films of the past decade

An overwhelming tenderness flows through Azazel Jacobs’ His Three Daughters. Set almost entirely within an apartment and the greying chill of the building’s courtyard, the film focuses on three sisters waiting for their father’s death. Tender like a flowering bruise or a poorly healed scar, pain echoes through the space. As much as this is a film about death, it’s a movie about the power family has to dole out painful jabs and memories. It’s a portrait of sisterhood that underlines vulnerabilities and ruptures, specifically the way death threatens carefully managed negotiations of emotion and peace. Death, lingering in the slightly yellowed halls of their father’s home, might be a dull, aching experience but for the most part it defies the idea that any of us go quietly into the night.

While the premise might lend the viewer to assume that His Three Daughters is little more than a filmed play, that could not be further from the truth. Using alienating composition and destabilizing montage, various cinematic techniques mirror the inner turmoil of the performances. With cinematography by Sam Levy (Lady Bird and Frances Ha), the film has a strong sense of meaning built through mise-en-scène. Characters are cornered in spaces, looking off and locked into spaces that feel crushingly small and somehow eternal. Evocative in many ways of more serious-minded Woody Allen with dashes of Hal Ashby, His Three Daughters feels like a film by a director who’s part of a lineage of New York-based American auteurs. The movie maintains a dash of humour, too — a kind of self-reflexive meanness that conceals the fear of being hurt. Every once in awhile, the movie’s grimness will give in to a comedy-of-errors setup, underlying the ways siblings are often more dissimilar than they are the same.

The movie stars Elizabeth Olsen, Natasha Lyonne and Carrie Coon as the three sisters. Now living in different parts of the country, their reunion is not a happy one. When Cinemascope chose Jacobs as one of the 50 filmmakers under 50 to watch back in 2012 (he is now 52), Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote about his preoccupation as a filmmaker, “One of the curses of American life is the lack of viable incentives for ‘growing up,’ and both Jacobs père and fils are preoccupied with this dilemma” (Rosenbaum is making reference to the fact that Azazel’s father, Ken Jacobs, is considered one of the great filmmakers of the American avant-garde). Suddenly facing a push to grow up so totally, to come to terms with your last parent dying, the characters are thrust into crisis.

Grappling with the ties that bind these women together, the film toys with the idea that even siblings experience the relationship between parent and child differently. While each girl loves their father, each relationship with him is different. After one of many fights, Christina (Olsen), the youngest, asks her sisters to sit down and talk about their feelings about their father. The people-pleaser who spent much of her youth (and adulthood) following the Grateful Dead around, Christina has a tendency towards sentimentality and openness. Looking around the home heavy with so many memories, she recognizes that not only do many of them not belong to her, but remain forever unknown to her. Even though it’s a space she grew up in, it’s one of mystery and uncertainty as much as it is familiarity and comfort.

The movie’s softness, though, lies in the fact that it’s not just grim. There are recurring comedic bits and moments of intense compassion. As the movie creaks towards its end point, it has moments of such tremendous lightness that are as emotionally charged as the weight of death. It counterbalances grim alienation with hope and love. Though it threatens to be overly sentimental, the movie maintains enough ironic distance to avoid any cheapness. The characters are just real enough, even with their theatrical cadence that implies grand performance — that suggests its importance. The movie is monumental for its humour as much as for its seriousness. Life is absurd, but so is death. We might as well smile.

His Three Daughters screened to mostly positive reviews when it premiered last fall at TIFF but it didn’t make big waves. It seems improbable, but it easily ranks among the greatest American films of the past decade. As simple as the film is, it’s astonishingly powerful as a portrait of delayed adulthood. It captures fundamental truths about family that often feel glib; that we’re always our parents’ children or that our siblings are often our most consistent (if not contentious) companion through life. His Three Daughters is a work of tremendous honesty. It’s a movie that utilizes the intimacy of the movie theatre to great effect. Though it hits streaming by the end of the month, it’s a movie that isn’t suited to passive viewing. See it on the big screen if possible. ■

His Three Daughters (directed by Azazel Jacobs)

His Three Daughters opens exclusively at Cinéma Moderne (5150 St-Laurent) on Friday, Sept. 6, and will begin streaming on Netflix on Sept. 20.

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