[Film Review] Family Viewing (1987) 7.2/10

A juvenilia from Canadian maverick Atom Egoyan, FAMILY VIEWING is his sophomore feature filmed when he was 27 year old. 18-year-old Van (Tierney) spends a lot of time visiting his maternal grandmother Armen (Keklikian), who is an Armenian immigrant now bedridden and vegetating in a nursing home, watching television with fellow invalids in a catatonic state, including the mother of Aline (Khanjian).

Van’s mother has been long out of the picture, he lives in a condominium apartment with his father Stan (Hemblen) and his lover Sandra (Rose), but his intention of moving Armen into the apartment is foiled by both, then one day, in the wake of an accident, with the consent of Aline, he finds an ingenious way if it beggars belief, to deceive Stan and is able to taking Armen out of the crummy nursing home.

In the mode of a shoestring production, FAMILY VIEWING makes a good fist of probing the fundamentals of watching and being watched, all the scenes in Stan’s condominium apartment are grainy, low-resolution home video footage that slowly unravels the insalubrious sides behind a closed door: Van’s transgressive attachment with Sandra is semi-incestuous (Rose is charismatically affectionate to countervail the relationship’s uncomfortable intimacy); Stan’s sexual proclivity involves making home videos of his sex act and enacting phone sex with Rose through a third party (which is also Aline’s avocation to earn extra money), the peculiar attention to unorthodox sexuality and social malaise has been one of the leitmotifs among his corpus, and here, Egoyan shows his acute acumen and felicity that leavens the narrative with strangely invoked aplomb and a knowingness that is devoid of neither mean-spirited judgements, nor simple sensationalization.

To today’s eyes, FAMILY VIEWING is first and foremost, an odd conversation piece of the analog era that facilitates our obsession with the naked truth, accompanied by Michael Danna’s equally unorthodox soundtrack that shreds any semblance of normalcy in Egoyan’s clinical dissection of a society both ailed and strengthened by alienation and peculiarity.

referential entries: Steven Soderbergh’s SEX, LIES AND VIDEOTAPE (1989, 7.3/10); Egoyan’s CHLOE (2009, 6.9/10).