14/04/2022 - Peter Entell recounts the daily life of an elderly man – his father – who found himself raising his four children alone

It took Peter Entell a good fifteen years to watch and edit the numerous videos he shot of his father (whom he followed for another fifteen years) living in the United States. A long wait for a director who does not often (if ever) point the camera at himself, at his own experience. The images he gives us, modest and courageous, speak louder than words and confront us with a reality, that of old age and family ties, which we often tend to silence.

The American director but Swiss by adoption returns with Getting Old Stinks to Visions du réel where he had already presented Sisters [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile] in 2018, also in the Burning Lights Competition. If his previous film already focused on family ties, those between two sisters separated at birth, Getting Old Stinks goes even further by revealing an unseen facet of an involved director. The film takes us to the heart of the filmmaker's family history, led by a jovial and tender father, who we sense contains many dark corners: immigration when he was only two years old and the early loss of his wife, who only appears in the film as a shadow and whom he never discusses with his son.

Under the guise of a "family film," Getting Old Stinks turns out to be more complex, a story made up of many layers that brush against each other, interacting only at times. On the one hand we have the story of the director's father, which is mixed with the problems of aging, and on the other that of his mother, who died suddenly when she was still young and never faced the passage of time. In parallel, however, another story emerges, that of the director and his relationship with these two central figures who keep secrets that will remain so. Between the folds of these different stories lie a series of micro-truths, such as the fact that the father, now so fragile and good-natured, did not know how to "educate" his son and beat him, complicating the overall picture and giving the story an unexpected aura of mystery.

The director's voice, often absent from his films, appears to comment on a reality that belongs to him alone but which, at the same time, speaks to all of us: the relationship established with one's family members, made up of intimacy but also mystery. With his comments, Entell delves into a dense network of relationships made up of rituals, a subtle dose of humour and wounds that are still too painful to deal with. Like life itself, the film is made up of scenes that seem to repeat themselves endlessly: birthdays celebrated in the same restaurant where the same jokes are said, chocolates with kirsch brought from Switzerland and the unfailing song about hugs that the father never stops reciting. This cyclical movement is marked by subtle but significant changes that underline the unstoppable passage of time: the gaps in memory and the movements that become slower and slower.

In spite of the themes addressed – old age (that of one's parents but also one's own) and the loss of loved ones – Getting Old Stinks nevertheless manages, thanks to the humour and generosity of its protagonists, to avoid falling into pure nihilism, a glimmer of light to which everyone can give the meaning they want.

Getting Old Stinks is produced by Show and Tell Films which also handles the international sales.

(Translated from Italian)