Television: Did that happen? The drama “The Father” about the great forgetting

It is a quiet film, unobtrusive, subtle, but all the more haunting. And that is mainly due to the main actors: Anthony Hopkins shines in the drama “The Father” as a proud, sometimes stubborn old man who is increasingly succumbing to dementia and cannot understand what is happening around him. Olivia Colman (“The Favourite”) as the daughter is just as intense: her relationship with her increasingly rebellious father oscillates between despair and hope, between love and anger. It is not an easy film to watch on Friday at 10:20 p.m. in the ARD summer cinema on Das Erste, but it is presented with a certain lightness – and with a few narrative tricks.

French director Florian Zeller, who brought the material to the stage in 2012, does not tell the story of Anthony and Anne in a strictly chronological or coherent manner in his 2021 feature film debut. He dares to make leaps without announcing them. He suddenly presents another actress (Olivia Williams) who is supposed to be Anne and who Anthony cannot recognize as Anne any more than the audience. And in doing so, he gives an insight into Anthony’s dementia-ridden perception: Did the conversation with Anne about her move to Paris really take place? Was there an argument with her husband? Does this husband even exist? Or was it just in Anthony’s head?

In his dementia drama, Zeller thankfully avoids medical jargon, white coat analyses and clinical standards. He concentrates fully on his two main characters: Anthony, this intelligent, strong man who is increasingly losing himself and the world around him. And Anne, this loving daughter fighting for her father, whose strength is slowly running out. In this way, he describes, in a dramatic film, a scenario that has played out hundreds of thousands of times in families: the difficulty of dealing with the dementia of a loved one; the pain of no longer being recognized by that person; the loss of a person, their memories, their identity.

Hopkins plays all of this with his own intensity, between strength and vulnerability. He is the stubborn patriarch who says mean things. He is the charmer who makes the young nurse laugh over a whisky. He is the desperate old man who no longer knows what is going on around him. He rarely lays it on too thick, but skillfully alternates between these extremes. For “The Father”, the then 83-year-old Briton more than deservedly received his second Oscar for best actor – after the first award in 1992 for his role as serial killer Hannibal Lecter in “Silence of the Lambs”.