Your Mum and Dad

The Dutch documentarian Klaartje Quirijns turns the camera on her own family in a fudged attempt to illustrate the benefits of therapy.

Back in 2016, the Polish director Pawel Lozinski made a wonderful but little-known film entitled You Have No Idea How Much I Love You. Featuring the therapist Bogdan de Barbaro, it was a recreation with actors of how therapy could help a mother and her 23-year-old daughter who were at odds. The complete conviction of its insights made it compelling and on reading about Your Mum and Dad: A Devastating Truth I hoped for something comparable. This documentary, the work of Dutch filmmaker Klaartje Quirijns, has been described in terms which made it sound fascinating and it too has a real life therapist, the New York-based African-American Dr. Kirkland Vaughans, as a central figure.

Billed as a universal story of family and trauma and with a title linked to the famous poem by Philip Larkin This Be the Verse (“They fuck you up your mum and dad. They may not mean to but they do.”), the film is offered as a document that focuses on the filmmaker's friend Michael Moskowitz, a patient of Dr Kirkland Vaughans. But we are also told that in addition the film looks inward when Klaartje Quirijns faces up to the trauma that exists in her own family, the never discussed death of an older sister who drowned before Klaartje was born.

A senior fellow at London's Tavistock Institute has praised this film to the skies describing it as a huge contribution to human psychology and to public mental health. That suggests that if you approach the film as an insider its merits are clear. But approaching it as a film critic I myself found that material capable of making an impact was ruined for me by the way in which the director chose to assemble it. The two threads mentioned proved to be less than the whole story since they lead back to studies of the parents’ parents and their problems while on top of that the filmmaker’s daughter Roxanne Witteveen is also featured and comments on her uneasy relationship with her mother.

Such a wide range of material calls for highly adept treatment with each aspect given time to establish itself in the viewer’s mind. But what we get here is a film which jumps from one personal situation to another jumbling them up while also incorporating visual illustrations which distractingly result in the screen ratio changing back and forth again and again. Some of these insertions are doubtless genuine pictures of the people concerned, but others are there simply for dramatic affect (when Moskowitz talks of being abused as a child by his mother we get bizarre shots of a knife-thrower using a child as the target to be framed by her knives).

While Dr Kirkland Vaughans is frequently seen in actual therapy sessions with Moszkowitz on the couch, he also pontificates about it direct to camera. The words spoken are always what matters but Quirijns seems determined to cut away to images that add nothing, montage sequences included. Furthermore, she opts not for a music score as such but for extracts from existing works and these too often come over as distracting irrelevancies. It is the case that various viewpoints expressed are of interest, one such being the notion that the self is shaped by the internalising appraisals of others. Ideas like this seem to call out for further elaboration but that is lacking and it remains unclear just how universal the patterns that keep emerging here of what parents pass down to their children are thought to be. Certainly the material exists for an interesting and thought-provoking film, but the way in which it is presented to us is so lacking in flow and so much in need of better filmmaking that my disappointment was total. Let us hope that this reaction is an intensely personal one and that other viewers will find the film’s presentational approach far less off-putting than I did.

MANSEL STIMPSON

Featuring  Michael Moskowitz, Kirkland Vaughans, Klaartje Quirijns,  Hannes Witteveen, Roxanne Witteveen, Nina Witteveen.

Dir Klaartje Quirijns, Pro Pieter van Huijstee, Screenplay Klaartje Quirijns and Boris Gerrets, Ph Klaartje Quirijns and others, Ed Boris Gerrets.

Pieter van Huijstee Films/EO Docs-Dartmouth Films.
75 mins. The Netherlands. 2019. UK Rel: 29 April 2022. Cert. 15.