The feeling of inevitability that surrounds The Father’s final scene does nothing to dampen its devastating impact. In the care home, as the cacophony of confusion quietens down and we finally step outside of Anthony’s skull, away from the paranoia and constantly shuffling surroundings, we’re forced to finally confront the disempowering, disorientating cruelty of dementia. Talking to his patient nurse, the only clarity Anthony can really find is that he is interminably losing his memory. Then he breaks down.
It was the first scene Florian Zeller, the French director and co-writer of the film, envisioned for the adaptation of his celebrated play, La Pére. He knew he had to get it right. “In a way, if that scene was not as powerful as it should have been, the whole thing could have been pointless,” he tells us over Zoom. “So we shot that scene slightly nervous, also, because we knew that the emotions that we were supposed to reach were raw, brutal, truthful, and not easy to get. It was a very intense moment for us.”
The faces in the final scene – those of nurse Catherine (Olivia Williams) and her assistant Bill (Mark Gatiss) – had appeared before in the movie as a number of different characters. It’s clear that his disjointed memory had mixed and melded different figures together, leaving him unable to parse the people in his life. The rotating cast is just one expression of Anthony’s loosening grip on reality. “The set was changing all the time,” says Zeller, who changed details in the flat to subtly reflect Anthony’s state of mind. “So we were ourselves in a labyrinth, and in a way it helped. We had to let […] the arc and journey go. It was all about being connected with the scenes themselves.”
Before Anthony’s conversation with the carer, he has a gut-wrenching conversation with his daughter, Anne (Olivia Colman). She tells him that she is moving to Paris (a revelation that came at the start of the story – or was it towards the end? – but Anthony had lost track of along the way), and that he would be living in an assisted living facility; that she would visit some weeks for walks. It’s a gentle, heart-breaking exchange that contrasts heavily with the often-casual cruelty and suspicion with which Anthony treated her previously. Then Anne leaves tearfully towards her new life. Zeller asked his actors not to rehearse, but to feel the full weight of the moment. “The most challenging part of that scene was not to write it,” he tells us. “It was to, with the actors, explore the emotions. And we were very aware with Anthony that it was a special moment of the film.”
It was an approach that Olivia Colman responded to well. “Not rehearsing is something I always like to do, and I think Tony is the same,” she tells us. “If I was doing a play, I would want to rehearse for months, but with filming it's so lovely to hear it for the first time and to just respond to each other and play off each other. And particularly with material like this, it couldn't have been better or more and more enjoyable, which sounds so weird having seen the film, but we loved it. We had a really nice time.”
For Zeller, much of the scene’s power came from the words that were left unspoken, and the emotional conflict that exists within Anne. “Anthony and Olivia were completely connected to each other emotionally. And sometimes it was so powerful for me just to watch that. Sometimes Anne is smiling to her father, because this is what she gives to him, but we the viewers can see that behind the smile she is exhausted,” he says. “You can see that she's desperate, you can see the ambivalence. And you know, only great actors can give you so many layers in the same face, in the same smile. And that's something that I was really impressed by.”
In the climax that follows, Anthony asks his carer if she knows his mother – who had obviously passed away long ago. Then he begins to cry and call for her, like a distressed child might when overwhelmed and confused by the world, and Catherine comforts him. “I feel as if I’m losing all my leaves”, he tells her. For Zeller, it was a line that perfectly encompassed the whole film – so what was he trying to get across?
“It's a line that means nothing. ‘I'm losing all my leaves', and at the same time, you understand exactly what it means,” he explains. “And in a way, it was the sum of what I wanted the audience to experience through that film, meaning that you are not understanding what is going on, and at the same time, on another level, emotionally, you understand everything.
“It was the whole journey I wanted the audience to go through in this labyrinth. Trying to understand with your brain, understanding that you're not capable of understanding everything. To let it go. To understand everything with your heart.”
The Father is out in cinemas now
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