With its stationary long-shots of domestic life, “Family Time” is like the “Paranormal Activity” of dysfunctional-holiday-gathering movies: There’s a sense of spying on people who don’t realize they’re under a microscope. Of course, Tia Kouvo’s debut feature is duly scripted, directed and professionally acted. But her approach is so effectively low-key, you might occasionally forget you’re watching a staged fiction.
There’s no new ground broken by this seriocomedy of three generations in one ordinary clan enduring each other over Christmas, then glimpsed in their separate lives afterward. Yet the canny level of observation — at once casual, caustic and empathetic — makes for a film that adds up to considerably more than the sum of its seemingly offhand parts. Finland’s Oscar submission won Jussi Awards for best film, direction and screenplay, and while it seems unlikely to make a splash internationally, it marks Kouvo as a promising talent.
The neutrality of Jesse Jalonen’s cinematography gets emphasized right away, as it focuses on a front door opening and shutting to let the principal characters inside — though we only see their midsections, as if the door itself were somehow the real object of interest. We suss soon enough, however, that this wooden A-frame abode is the home for retired grandparents whose progeny have arrived for annual Christmas festivities.
There’s a comfortable familiarity to their dynamics that encompasses a fair share of grumbling. When not dithering on about trivial matters, matriarch Ella (Leena Uotila) fusses over her spouse’s drinking habits. She claims Lasse (Tom Wentzel) is having a relapse after a spell of being “good,” but their daughters recall many past incidents when his booze-ups embarrassed them. Susanna (Ria Kataja) is proud of her new promotion at work as a large store’s chief window dresser; she and husband Risto (Jarkko Pajunen) have two grade-school-aged children, son Kassu (Toomas Talikka) and Hilla (Elli Paajanen), who’s a budding wee control freak. (It is prissy Hilla’s complaints that at one point get a soused Grandpa removed from the dinner table.) Helena (Elina Knihtila) is a tart-tongued divorcée who shrugs off the thought of even dating again. She’s looking forward to her newly adult only child Simo (Sakari Topi) moving out on his own, leaving her in blissful solitude.
Divided into two roughly equal parts, the film dedicates its first half to holidasy festivities that are same-as-ever, yet also repeatedly go off the rails a bit. The grandparents are each degenerating in their way, whether it’s a matter of brain fog or an unfortunately timed moment of incontinence. Stealing a private moment in the sauna, the sisters confess their frustrations, notably Susanna’s with a dutiful mate whom everyone likes — yet his conversation bores her, and he seems oblivious to her need for romantic attention.
Hilla takes it upon herself to scold Grandpa over his alcoholism (“Imagine what you and Grandma could have done with that money”), while gentle giant Simo flees the covert tensions briefly to do vehicular spin-outs in a shopping mall parking lot. Asked whether he’s acquired a girlfriend yet, he hints his preferences “might” lie elsewhere … but his elders here are too self-absorbed to press that issue.
Once the younger family members head home, we get unpredictable glimpses of everyone’s separate, everyday lives. Simo does move into his own flat; Grandpa is visited by an old friend (Matti Onnismaa) from his long-ago seafaring days. Most intense are a couple of scenes where Susanna and Risto realize the extent to which their marital communication has broken down. We can see that neither is exactly at fault, but they sure do infuriate each other, to the point of eventual tears and blows.
That explosion aside, however, “Family Time” operates at an almost anthropological remove from messy, up-close emotions — these aren’t personalities inclined toward high drama, anyway, preferring to avoid conflict through bland amiability. Even an eventual death in the family stirs no major histrionics.
With an excellent cast fully on board, Kouvo makes the muddling-through of unremarkable lives compelling in itself, as small details accumulate to form a bigger picture that still retains some mystery. These people are hardly enigmatic, but the puzzle pieces left out feel less like gaps than a reminder that there’s so much we don’t know or notice about others, even those supposedly closest to us. Not as self-conscious in her austere stylization as Finnish cinema’s leading figure, Aki Kaurismaki, this director echoes his technique and some of his droll humor — but she applies it to ends that mimic a kind of nonfiction surveillance. “Family Time” is compassionate in a mode that feels close to embedded documentary reportage, a sleight-of-hand gambit that’s impressive for its unshowy effectiveness.
