I left the cinema after the preview of Tudor Platon’s film An Almost Perfect Family with the feeling that I had witnessed an exercise in almost unbearable sincerity. While watching, I kept asking myself: how did the director convince his parents to accept not only being filmed, but especially being seen? Because this film is not just about showing images, but about letting yourself be looked at – and that hurts.
The film follows in parallel the dissolution of the family of origin and the formation of the new family that the director builds together with Carla. We see what he takes with him from the past, what remains imprinted in his gestures, in his awkwardness, in the way he tries to be present with his partner when they become parents. Yes, he is visibly more involved than his father was, but he still stumbles over his own difficulties in putting into words what he feels. The ending is bright, however: the hope remains that things can be done differently.
An almost perfect family
From a directorial point of view, the film is difficult. The pauses and silences are oppressive, turning us, the viewers, into prying eyes looking through a keyhole at a family’s turmoil. And inevitably, you oscillate between siding with the father and understanding the mother, with all her coping mechanisms – some more bearable, others difficult to bear.
There is another aspect that impressed me and which is related to the very nature of the trauma: the fact that the director had to keep rewatching, relistening, editing hours of footage with his own family. A kind of prolonged exposure, exactly like we do in therapy – when you are confronted again and again with the images and sounds that hurt, until the pain begins to settle, to allow itself to be processed. The editing thus becomes not only an artistic act, but also a therapeutic one: an attempt to keep something that would otherwise be unbearable in front of you.
In fact, the film becomes an X-ray of many “deceased” families, a generation carrying trauma: children born into the world labeled “unwanted”, adults who have learned to live intensely, but often inauthentically, caught in a permanent struggle to maintain appearances. Families that seem united to the world, but who behind closed doors live smoldering dramas. Lives suspended, not lived to their true potential.
I remembered a line from a character in an old movie: “How nice it would be if every person had two lives – one lived for others and one for yourself.” Except there isn’t. We only have one. And when you live it more for others, in the end you discover that you don’t have time left for yourself. That’s what hurts the most: realizing too late that you weren’t authentic, that you didn’t listen to your desires, that you lived conditioned.
Sometimes you are overcome by sadness, sometimes by anger. Some make a film, others write a book. Many end up in therapy. But, if you ask me, the most powerful antidote remains this: to be seen from a young age as you are, to be encouraged to live your own life, not the one dictated by the fear or shame of your parents. Perhaps the great trauma of families at that time is precisely the trauma of non-authenticity . And that’s where everything else comes from.