“I am losing all my leaves.”

THE FATHER (2020)
Dir.: Florian Zeller

Anthony (Sir Anthony Hopkins) knows the end is coming.

When his daughter, Anne, Olivia Colman (who played Godmother of Fleabag) comes and informs about her plan of moving to Paris, he is hurt. But he conceals and puts up a brave face and asks, “So if I understand correctly, you’re leaving me, is that it? You’re abandoning me.”

Who’s abandoning Anthony really? It is his mind and memory and his organs? Anthony wails in one scene, “I feel as if I am losing all my leaves.”

What a human on the verge of retiring from the life of flesh and blood desires? Anthony desires his daughter to be with him. In her daughter, he sees his mother. But does that mean his daughter should cling on to his aging father without living her life?

The Father is a new film directed by Florian Zeller, based on Zeller’s prize-winning French play. The treatment reminded me of Charlie Kaufman. Ludovico Einaudi’s score is a newfound treasure of my life. The color of the room changes, the London apartment turns into an old-age home, dementia, the confusion, and the frustration of the old man is shown and edited so seamlessly.

P.S.: A snippet from an interview Sir gave recently to THE NEW YORKER —
“The great liberation for me is to know that we are insignificant, that finally, it’s all a dream within a dream. Look at this moment. The pandemic has got us worried because we thought we knew everything. We don’t. We’re in the grips of an invisible little microbe. When we come through this, we’d better wake up and say, Stop it. Let’s get together, see what we can do as a community, instead of all this bitching and moaning and attacking everyone. It’s just a waste of time, waste of energy, waste of life.”

Pic Courtesy: The New Yorker.