Save the father

Last week I went to see Sorogoyen's new film, El ser querido, starring Javier Bardem and Vicky Luengo, which is about a renowned and controversial film director who calls his daughter, an actress with a stalled career who earns her living as a waitress and with whom he has no contact, to offer her a role in the new film he wants to shoot in the Sahara. It seems that when Valor sentimental, by Joachim Trier, was released last year, Sorogoyen's blood ran cold: the film, winner of the Cannes Grand Jury Prize, is about a renowned film director, Gustav Borg, played by Stellan Skarsgård, who offers a role to his daughter Nora, with whom he has no relationship, for his new film project. I understand the fear.I will not write an article comparing both films, nor will I try to critique them; I only want to reflect on the fact that unites the two titles in a more meaningful way. And forgive the spoiler, because one must start at the end: both Sorogoyen and Trier redeem the absent father. I mean: at the end of both films, repentant, sentimental, emotional, and even moved fathers appear to see their daughters there, acting so well, having turned that crazy project of filming together into a second chance that life has offered them. Both fathers are saved.Leaving the cinema, the first thing I thought was what would have happened if, instead of fathers, they had been mothers. This was already explained very well by Begoña Gómez Urzaiz in Las abandonadoras: while an absent father who sees his children a couple of times a year and pays child support more or less regularly can come to be seen as a good parent, a mother who does the same is almost a criminal. How could a woman want to abandon her child? What kind of monstrosity is this? Maria Montessori, Joni Mitchell, Ingrid Bergman, and so many others. The most interesting thing is that Gómez Urzaiz also reviews fictional mothers, such as Anna Karenina, Nora from A Doll's House, or Carol by Patricia Highsmith, tracing a cultural archive of how we have imagined the mother who disappears. There is no redemption for Karenina, with her tragic suicide at the end. And Nora, with that final slam of the door, we applaud her for freeing herself without ceasing to judge her. And regarding Carol, Gómez Urzaiz asks herself, with sincerity, how a mother can do that to her children.

More than the fact that they found similar arguments, what intrigued me is that both directors chose the same ending. I tried to convince myself that the father's redemption does not mean that the films absolve them morally and that, perhaps, what they are doing is showing something structural: the enormous difficulty we have in imagining a family story that does not end, in some way, by restoring the paternal figure. However, I believe that both films are not heading in that direction and they demonstrate that, in reality, the father's redemption is still necessary because it continues to function as the guarantee of family meaning, in that the atonement of the absent father (Bardem's final tear) is a cultural mechanism that repairs the family institution, even if the entire film has been dedicated to showing the family as broken.Both Bardem and Skarsgård are fathers who fail, but who do not disappear completely, and the solution proposed by both scripts is not that perhaps we can live without our parents, but that we needed our parents to have known how to be parents. It is also curious that a formally risky and genuine film like Sorogoyen's proposes this sociologically conservative conclusion. Perhaps I am taking a risk with the final diagnosis, but something tells me that these two do-gooder endings demonstrate that, little by little, in recent years, we have been replacing paternal authority with paternal vulnerability, which means that if that Kafkaesque, authoritarian, provider, and distant father ends up showing some sensitivity, however little it may be, however fragile and thin his emotion may be, it is enough for us. It happens, however, that this sentimental turn does not go hand in hand with the disappearance of paternal centrality. On the contrary: it reinforces it. Now what we like is to see repentant fathers. And fathers who embrace emotional authenticity: they don't need to materially repair the harm (how is that done?); it is enough that they show what they feel.