Un air de famille: "Father Mother Sister Brother"

Much as any family is composed of disparate parts, so too Jim Jarmusch's Father Mother Sister Brother - surprise winner of last year's Venice Golden Lion - is made up of separate, only loosely connected items. This new film marks a return to the portmanteau form of Jarmusch's earlier Night on Earth and Coffee and Cigarettes: it's really three shorts, of roughly thirty minutes apiece, on a familial theme. The first, "Father", finds a straight-edged brother and sister (Adam Driver and Mayim Bialik) venturing deep into the New Jersey woods to pay a long-overdue visit with the hermit-like father (Tom Waits) who's been scrounging money off the pair of them. "Mother", set in and around Dublin's suburbs, describes a gathering of matriarch Charlotte Rampling and her two daughters, uptight Cate Blanchett and pink-haired free spirit Vicky Krieps; it's unclear whether or not it's a good sign that all three women have shown up wearing Bergman scarlet. (Ingmar, not Ingrid.) Finally, in "Sister Brother", the most wide-ranging of the three shorts, Indya Moore and Luka Sabbat play recently orphaned American twins in Paris, wondering what to do with the apartment - and the material objects - their folks have left behind. A very Jarmuschian - indeed, very indie - idea of the family emerges: people have secrets they hide from one another, communication is often awkward, strained and unnatural, and were it not for the fact they share a surname and a bloodline, nobody would think to put some of these individuals together. (For starters: Adam from Girls and Blossom from Blossom. And you're telling me Tom Waits gave life to these two?!) And yet: in a moment where America's conservative faction is getting weird (again) around the family unit and the roles we play within it, there is something heartening about Jarmusch's Zen insistence we could all stand to be a good deal chiller about everything familial. So yes, some of our relatives are flawed and imperfect; and yes, those closest to us by birth are still often kind of unknowable. But - and here you can almost hear Jarmusch adding a "hey man" as a footnote to every frame of each story he tells here - that's cool, too.

Onscreen, the worldview manifests as a radical simplification of form. The shorts are self-contained units, affording ample time and space to small, manageable casts whose individual components have either worked with this director before or are hip enough to know the effect Jarmusch seeks: not straining but being, with no labouring of the point. "Father" is an especially effective platform for Waits to play the sly old goat (or Jersey Devil); one of its takehomes is that every film would be improved with a bit more Tom Waits. While we wait for Hollywood to address that issue, Jarmusch leaves us to savour the eternal pleasures of the uncluttered frame: FMSB is unmistakably the work of a creative who's been left to do his own thing for nigh-on fifty years, who feels beholden to no contemporary trend. The crisp, clear photography - credited to veteran Lynch favourite Frederick Elmes and the versatile, much-travelled Yorick Le Saux - allows a hundred tiny gestures to register; one overhead shot of a table set for tea in the second part may be the most elegant spread I've seen in the American cinema this side of Scorsese's The Age of Innocence. (Jarmusch finds it so tasty he keeps cutting back to it.) If there's a slight limitation, it's that the film's overarching philosophy is consistent to the point of repetition. Jarmusch acknowledges as much, writing in links between the three shorts: shots of passing skateboarders (liberated from familial duty, unlike his main characters), a recurring use of the phrase "Bob's your uncle" (more family), an ongoing discourse on the properties and uses of water (being thinner than blood). Everything (kind of) connects, but only the third short feels like any true progression - being what happens after mother and father, and indeed "Mother" and "Father", have passed - and Moore and Sabbat work up what feels instinctively like an authentic, earnest sibling bond. (They've got one another's backs, which still counts for something in Jarmuschland.) The whole project is as vibes-based as the contemporary cinema gets without the manager hanging crystals up in the foyer, but it's fun to see Jarmusch, erstwhile king of ironic detachment, getting a little cuddlier with age: he's still chill, but he's grown into welcoming a little more warmth into his frames.

Father Mother Sister Brother is now playing in selected cinemas.