“Through photographs, each family constructs a portrait-chronicle of itself—a portable kit of images that bears witness to its connectedness,” wrote Susan Sontag in On Photography. “Photography came along to memorialize, to restate symbolically, the imperiled continuity and vanishing extendedness of family life.” Sontag makes this case as the nuclear family was being cleaved from a larger family aggregate within the industrializing West.
Set just before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, Lucy Kerr’s feature debut, Family Portrait (winner of the 2023 Boccalino d’Oro for Best Director at Locarno), surveys a sprawling family the morning of their planned group portrait. One of the daughters, Katy (Deragh Campbell), and her boyfriend Olek (Chris Galust), the designated photographer, are set to leave for the airport shortly after the portrait is taken. But when Katy’s mother disappears and the plans begin to feel more lax, she anxiously wanders the property in search of answers from her extended family.
There is a sense of foreboding hovering over the family that seems to only affect Katy, abuzz with disaster and failing to corral her disinclined clan into a moment of feigned affection. The director’s note fittingly points to Roland Barthes, for whom “family photographs […] are a desperate means to freeze time and immortalize the family. However, what the family doesn’t realize yet is that, as they smile and pose for the picture, they have already died.”
Where Sontag is contending with the image as proof of life, Barthes registers its material disharmony as a death sentence. Both sides of the coin are true in Kerr’s film, where family rituals are both torn and lamented. Katy is seeking order and reassurance in the face of indifference, evidently not for the first time; her overstimulation and sense of urgency is exacerbated by a sister’s snark, the spontaneous death of a distant relative, the lack of concern about her mother’s whereabouts, and Olek’s impatience surrounding the photo.
Shot on the Guadalupe River in Hunt, Texas, the film makes great use of its scenery, with Katy wading through the woods like lost prey, away from her family. As her sisters discuss their dreams and abstractions, she plunges into the river as if to correct herself of her panic. With Family Portrait, Kerr deftly crafts a landscape with an unstable pulse, where characters disappear into themselves and their surroundings—a pandemic-era poem, an exercise in evaporation.
Family Portrait screens this evening, and throughout the week, at Metrograph.
