Your Mum and Dad review – Larkin-inspired essay on a family’s psychological wounds
There is some insightful material in this personal essay-film from Dutch documentary maker and journalist Klaartje Quirijns, avowedly inspired by Philip Larkin’s poem This Be the Verse about your mum and dad fucking you up. It’s a painful probing of a psychological wound in her parents’ lives: the death of Quirijns’s elder sister in a drowning accident. That undoubtedly contributed to the disintegration of their marriage and is something which her elderly parents have never talked about until now: she makes them open up to her about it, on camera.
Quirijns was apparently moved to consider this, and to take stock of her own life and upbringing, because of having surgeries on her breast, though she doesn’t actually say the word “cancer” out loud, an avoidance that an analyst might have questioned her about. But at 75 minutes, this film strangely feels too brief to do full justice to the story, and it is in any case intercut with footage of another case of family trauma which Quirijns had evidently been working on for years before deciding to shift focus to her own tale. This second element is about the unhappiness of Michael Moskowitz, whose Holocaust-survivor mother was cruel to him when he was growing up; Moskowitz is shown talking about it all in sessions with his analyst, a wise and gentle man called Dr Kirkland Vaughans.
There are points of similarity in their respective cases, and the film duly touches on them, but it sounds glib and it’s impossible not to wonder if Quirijns would not have been better off concentrating on the one story that is centrally important to her, her own, and digging deeper into that. This is a film whose potential is not fully realised.
• Your Mum and Dad is in cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema from 29 April.