Film Festival Film #6: Blessed

[bcholmes]

Blessed is an Australian feature film about parent-child relationships. It's structured in the hyperlink cinema style, with multiple story-lines going on. The first part of the film focuses on the children. Most of the kids are in their teens; one is now an adult. Some of them are runaways. Others are rebellious. There don't seem to be any healthy parent-child relationships that are part of this story.

The second part of the film backs up and re-tells much of the story from the perspective of the mothers. (I think there's only one father in the entire film).

Dysfunctional parent-child stories can often really hit me, but this one not so much. I think I found it a bit manipulative. It used all the Big Pathos story elements. Kids running away because of sexual abuse. Suicide attempts. Trouble with the law. Other tragedies. And the film tended to be permeated with an uber-seriousness that, I think, grew to be a bit monotonous.

But, also, I felt like there was something going on with class in the film. The parents all seemed to be poor or working class (with the one exception: the mother of the adult child appeared to come from a higher class, but had a Marxism fixation). To some extent, I felt like the story seemed to be saying, "poor people make terrible parents." Which, yuck. (There was a line in the end credits that suggested that the film came out of a workshop called "Who's Afraid of the Working Class?", so maybe that's just a consequence of its origins.)