Venice: Jim Jarmusch’s Golden Lion winner Father Mother Sister Brother is an eloquent snapshot of family life

Minimalism isn’t just a strategy to reduce things to their sharpest, cleanest form; for Jim Jarmusch, it gives every directorial decision he makes a particular weight, making the humour more comically deadpan, and the notes of poignancy that more eloquent.

Father Mother Sister Brother, a popular winner of Venice’s Golden Lion last week, finds American cinema’s most unflappable “cool guy” finally loosening up, continuing a tendency in his work first seen in Paterson. I cherished his early features as young cinephile because I knew they had better, and more cultivated taste than me, and flaunted it; now, Jarmusch feels more comfortable in domestic spaces and quotidian routines, trafficking in pure relatability. It’s easy to see how it united a disparate global main competition jury, although the president Alexander Payne has spoken before of his admiration for Jarmusch.

Anthology films with contributions from multiple directors saw a heyday in the 1960s; now, auteurs like Yorgos Lanthimos and Wes Anderson have been queuing up to tackle them, often with weak results. But Jarmusch has shown a unique propensity for this format over his career, using it to develop his themes in a manner the typical three-act structure can’t. In Father Mother Sister Brother’s three segments, he takes a stock scenario - adult siblings visiting their distant parents after an extended period of time - and extracts different insights and variations, like photographs of the same object from three specific angles (an analogy that’s almost repeated in an eerie moment in the second chapter).

Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik play siblings visiting their shambling, deadbeat dad (the great Tom Waits) in the first part. Then, Charlotte Rampling is a quite imperious novelist (a callback perhaps to her character from Ozon’s Swimming Pool), welcoming her daughters (Cate Blanchett and Vicky Krieps) to a quaint “afternoon tea”; Krieps wins the audience’s affections for not seeming as intimidated by her mom, however well-meaning and prim she seems. And then in the most directly touching vignette, Luka Sabbat and Indya Moore are siblings settling their deceased parents affairs’ in Paris, following their death in a mysterious self-piloted plane crash.

Perhaps I’m particularly sensitive to this topic now, as my parents begin to age themselves, but Jarmusch has created something emotionally cutting here. A parental relationship as an adult, once you’re mature and self-sufficient to become a parent yourself, can have a perennially odd tenor, filled with silences, and affection only at arm’s length. Father Mother Sister Brother is a painful acknowledgement of this, with no wounds or uncertainties healed for false catharsis.