QUICK ‘N DIRTY: LIVE FROM TALLINN
The relationship between two siblings is one that only they can truly understand. Belgian director Kat Steppe’s Sunday Ninth portrays a fractious relationship between Horst (Josse De Pauw) and Franz (Peter Van den Begin), two adversarial brothers who are reunited after nearly three decades of not speaking. After all this time they appear content to spite or physically injure one another. When Franz visits Horst in the care home, he pees on the bathroom floor and over his brother’s towel. Meanwhile, Horst draws blood by smacking Franz across the head with a tray. It would be shocking were it not so humorous because the pair find themselves sat in the manager’s office. It’s rather like we’re seeing two old men being pulled up by the school principal.
Financial hardship lie behind Franz’s surprise visit, who needs to secure his claim on any potential family inheritance. Alzheimers, however, is erasing Horst’s memories. After living a discontented life, he’s slowly forgetting his parents and the childhood he shared with his brother. With both their parents deceased, Horst’s fading memories shroud Franz in his own loneliness.
Sunday Ninth is an ambitious feature début because its director seeks to interweave observational documentary with fiction. The director expresses the hope that their approach “allows fiction to take a step further” and adds that, “Blending real people into the fictional storyline highlights the real-life story, and vice versa”. This is a difficult balance to strike, but there’s no doubting the real is genuine because Steppe shoots in an operational care home.
The observational documentary side of Sunday Ninth is flawless, representing the experiences of carers and patients with a dignity and respect. Those with experiences of Alzheimer’s, dementia and Parkinson’s should approach with caution to avoid potentially triggering scenes. As society reckons with rising cases of these conditions, the need to have them represented on screen only grows.
Tim Burton’s Big Fish (2003) did a masterful job of using a character’s imagination to celebrate a life lived. Here, in Sunday Ninth, Steppe rather brilliantly creates a series of spatial transitions between the brothers being grounded in reality and disappearing into their memories. Steppe uses the adult versions of Horst and Franz to replace their younger selves when remembering their childhoods – they look the same, only older. It’s amusing to see the older brothers dressed like they were boys. This back and forth transports the audience inside of not only a story, but the characters’ intimate space, because is there anything more personal than one’s memories?
Sadly, this is where Steppe is tripped up because the real is actually predicated on the fiction elements. Sunday Ninth struggles to detail the story of Horst and Franz’s childhood, where their rivalry was born, and the interesting relationship they shared with their parents, and the dynamic between mother and father. Steppe tries to imbue the fiction with a semblance of authentic reality. Her hopes that the two would complement one another is not wholly successful, but her efforts and victories in a challenging enterprise deserve acknowledgement.
Sunday Ninth just premiered in the First Feature Competition of the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.
