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Can the tensions and stresses of unhappy family life lead to one member bein? avoid, and perhaps resolve, the family’s conflicts? An important new film explj1 Considering what an enormously important job they have to do parents don’t get much training - if any at all. By the time we are old enough to question the way in which our parents brought us up we are too old to do anything about it anyway. We can develop a different set of values and ‘unlearn’ inherited prejudices but the basic mould which fashions us remains substantially intact.
Throughout Christian history, the family unit has been looked upon as a force for good, the basis of all social order, in fact too much has always been expected of it. Depending upon its members - and particularly upon the parents - the family can be a force for evil and disintegration just as easily as it can be a power for harmony and progress.
Kestrel Films’ new production, Family life* is a blistering examination of the family as an agent of destruction yet the family on which it focuses is by no means exceptional. One like it, with the parents’ marriage in a propped-up state of bored, resigned decay, is probably known to all of us.
The screenplay by David Mercer is an expansion of the theme of his 1967 television play hi two minds. David Mercer agrees with R. D. Laing’s concept of what we call ‘schizophrenia’ being the ‘fragmentation of the personality’ occurring when a member of a family takes on the burdens of the unacknowledged conflicts of the family and becomes the scapegoat and withdraws, or is driven, into a ‘schizophrenic state’.
The events in the plot would be mundane except that the trivia and skirmishes of the unhappy family’s *Academy 1 from January 13th and selected ABC cinemas throughout the country.
life combine to plunge the daughter, Janice, into a state of mind which is ‘abnormal’ an eventual diagnosis of ‘schizophrenia’ and a wide range of treatment in mental hospital.
Janice does get pregnant and has an abortion at her mother’s insistence but these two events, which might be expected to be points of high drama in the film, are almost inconsequential. On screen they only serve to add fuel to bitter family rows, they are ammunition with which the parents can reload for the continuing onslaught on their daughter.
Each incident, each eruption of tension intensifies the level of unexpressed emotion within the family, simmering and bubbling just below the surface ‘normality’. It is a family controlled and manipulated by a prim, overbearing, claustrophobic and impossible mother. Well-meaning in her own terms, she has emasculated her husband over the years and, with her blinkered belief in ‘what’s best’, allows her daughter no scope for development or independence. It is a family which sets a premium on emotion being kept under control.
Ken Loach, the director, allows the film to evolve at its own halting pace. Here is a family forced by a crisis to talk, to try to express long-buried feelings and it is not easy. David Mercer’s dialogue vividly shows that what passes for conversation in many families is usually either banter or abuse and when they really have to communicate, to listen to each other, the words are awkward and hesitant. Even then there is no common ground, no compromise, no sense of ‘getting through.
The film runs for 107 minutes, the producer, Tony Garnett, still thinks it should be shorter but everyone is at a loss to know where to cut it. The development led out for ‘mental illness’ or even unconsciously ‘electing’ to become ill to lis theory on man’s most baffling disorder.
In a bored daze, Janice - the central character in Family life - drifts from one dead-end job to the next wanting something better out of life but too perplexed and indecisive to know what to do about it.
is slow but right, it captures the reality of a family reduced to a series of hopeless, inarticulate gestures - knowing that something fundamental has gone wrong but unable to admit it or come to grips with it because what is wrong is the family as a whole. ‘Of course, it’s always the parents they blame first these days, isn’t it’ says the mother settling into an armchair at her first interview with the young psychiatrist in charge of the ‘therapeutic community ward which Janice first enters.
For the day of her daughter’s admission to hospital she has had a hair-do and taken her fur piece out of moth-balls. She is confused about young people’s values and admits to the doctor that she doesn’t know ‘where it will all end. She is shocked that the secretary who brings in the tea calls the doctor ‘Dave’ - ‘I mean, they treat you as an equal - it’s not right’.
In the ward Janice is free to express herself and be listened to for almost the first time. ‘I don’t feel there’s a “me” to choose for when it comes to making a big decision’, she says when the doctor asks her about her future.
Taking part in a group discussion, another girl expresses what is probably true of all the young people in the ward, driven towards ‘mental illness’ by family conflicts, ‘They think I’m being bad, I think I’m being myself. They think I’m destructive of myself but the thing that I am destroying is myself in them - I really don’t want them in me’.
Just when Janice seems to have a chance for progress in her ‘therapeutic community’ ward, the young psychiatrist’s appointment is not renewed by the hospital management committee acting on the advice of a ‘drug ‘em and shock ‘em’ consultant who has a low opinion of ‘experimental’ methods of treatment. The scene is a caricature of a hospital management committee speaking, in hardly more than a minute of screen time, volumes about the attitudes, composition and background knowledge of some such groups.
Janice becomes the patient of the consultant who relies on ‘physical’ methods of treatment and this switch gives David Mercer scope to examine what he has called ‘the major conflict in psychiatric ideology’. The contrast in methods is immediate and dramatic. Janice has the first of a series of electro-convulsive therapies (ECTs)-she protests weakly and desperately saying she doesn’t want the relaxing injection, not even knowing what is to follow it. A deeply disturbing sequence this, hinting at wide and indiscriminate use of ‘shock treatment’. Inevitably, since film is such a ‘concrete’ medium, the two types of psychiatric approach appear very black and white. The patient, gentle, young psychotherapy-based doctor is made to appear infinitely preferable to the consultant who relies on drugs and electricity and who has a God-like belief in himself and his treatment.
But what both Laing and David Mercer are questioning is the basic idea that there are mad people and sane people and mad people must be cured i.e. the philosophy of psychiatry. Is Janice ‘mentally ill’ at all or is she in fact preserving her sanity by adopting a form of defensive, protective behaviour? That behaviour might well appear ‘abnormal’ from ‘normal’ society’s point of view but is it necessarily insane?
Are the psychiatrists who are bent on administering drugs and ECTs in the interests of getting patients out of hospital and back into the community asking why their treatment appears to work or what it is they are curing? Are they returning people to a concept of ‘normality’ which is insane in another sense? Is the normal life from which they came and to which they are returned really normal?
‘We’ll eliminate the symptoms and soon have her back home’ the consultant tells Janice’s bewildered parents after the closure of the therapeutic community ward. And so he does, Janice is soon back home in a vague, subdued state, spending large parts of the day in bed, taking the tablets. But it is the home she has been returned to that is questionable - does it really represent ‘normality’?
She brightens whenever she comes into contact with her art-student boy friend and they spend one jolly afternoon spraying her father’s garden blue with cans of aerosol paint. Her parents see the prank as just another example of their daughter’s insanity ‘Have you seen the state my gnomes are in?’ says her father in a blustering rage.
In a devastating and harrowing sequence of mother’s birthday party the whole family are seen together for the only time and with disastrous results. Janice’s elder sister, Barbara, who long ago had the strength to escape from the family’s clutches, brings her children to tea. Whereas Janice is the one who gives in to her mother, buckles and has become the ‘scapegoat’, Barbara is the one who fights back and, seeing the state of her sister, she lets her parents have it with both barrels.
An enormous row filled with fury and loathing ensues which mother, in her usual infuriating way, chooses to ignore. Rebuke and recrimination fly across the tea-table like missiles until Janice, who has been completely silent, smashes her fists down on the table and screams out in distraught, pent-up anguish. The row has been about her and her future yet, again, she has taken no part in it - it has been as if she were not there, not a real person - but, by her dramatic outburst, she has put a stop to it. She has absorbed the conflict and ended it, she has adopted the role of scapegoat once again.
The same night Janice comes downstairs when the house is silent, absent-mindedly gouges chunks out of the dining table with a knife sharpener, and suddenly lashes out in all directions in frustrated rage smashing, among other things, father’s 25-year-longservice-presentation-clock. This is too much. They take her back to the hospital.
And so, the pattern of Janice’s life and her ‘illness’ is established - unless, somehow, she can find the strength and support not to have to return yet again to the family environment which has made her what she is, she appears to be doomed to shuttle between mental hospital with its treatment methods which are almost entirely irrelevant to her needs and a desperately unhappy home which offers only sterile, negative relationships which will sooner or later bounce her back to hospital again.
The hospital has nothing to offer her - graphically illustrated by a totally incomprehensible ‘chat’ with a ward sister who wants to put an end to Janice’s ‘dangerous’ walks in the hospital grounds with a young male patient but never actually mentions ‘sex’ or ‘men’ - all is starch and euphemism. The only ‘real’ person in Janice’s life in hospital is a superb Spanish nurse who soothes her after her outbursts of fury or when she is overwhelmed by her fears and hallucinations.
On a visiting day, her boy friend is so staggered by Janice’s fears of never getting out of hospital that he whisks her back to his flat then and there. But the hospital authorities come and retrieve her - ‘Don’t you think she’d be better off in hospital?’ says the general practitioner who has come with a psychiatrist and the ambulance to take her back. ‘No!’ retorts the boy with a desperate ferocity.
The final haunting scene is of Janice being used Janice explains to her art student boy friend that, although she loves the painting he has done for her, he will have to keep it for her because she knows per parents would refuse to have it in the house. In the final scene Janice - now mute, passive and apparently completely unaware of her surroundings - acts as a ‘classic case’ to illustrate the lecture given by the consultant on schizophrenia.
to illustrate a lecture on ‘the schizophrenic’ being given by the consultant. She appears even more withdrawn, passive and immobile - apparently completely unaware of her surroundings and what is being said about her ‘case’. ‘Any questions?’, says the consultant to the rows of yawning, doodling, bored medical students.
Family life makes its point with shattering force. It is a film which leaves you angry and sad - the sensation of impotence is almost total. But the active response to the film is to question assumptions, to resist generalisations and handy classifications of people into diagnostic groups. It asks psychiatry quite simply not to be sure of itself, not to be content with methods and results which it cannot really explain. The pressure is on psychiatry to increase its ‘productivity’, a rapid turn-ovei of patients can appear to be a measure of success and - to some extent - it is but, Family life is saying, it can be success at the expense of the individual patient. Psychiatrists are no ogres, they have the health and happiness of their patients in mind as their goal like all doctors but for them the goal is nothing like so easy to achieve and the routes to it may vary every time.
This is an important, intensely moving and thought-provoking film as relevant to a wide public because we are all members of families as it is to the professionals working in psychiatry because it pinpoints a dilemma they all have to resolve - or, at least, bear in mind. It is the most important film on a mental health subject to appear for many years, perhaps the most important, full stop.
The acting - all by virtually unknown screen actors - is flawless, totally convincing and a remarkable achievement especially that of Sandy Ratcliff as Janice. The direction has the sensitivity which is becoming Kestrel’s hall-mark and the film is packed with subtlties and nuances that would make seeing it over and over again a rewarding exercise.
It should attract big audiences but it will undoubtedly be disturbing, even to the best-adjusted cinema-goer, its potential impact on someone who has been ill or who identifies strongly with the girl or the mother is a bit worrying - to sound one note of warning.
The film distributors experience with Kes, made by the same film company, should increase the chances of Family life reaching the wide audience it so thoroughly deserves.
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