Fathers in cinema are generally either silent or downright absent. However, in Diary of a father, Paul-Claude Demers immediately affirms his desire to remain as present as possible for his six-year-old daughter who has gone abroad, evoking his own deceased adoptive father, who made him suffer for a long time through his silence. In a sometimes evocative, sometimes clumsy alloy of reconstructions and cinematographic archives, he connects his own story in parallel to that of all film buffs.
The director thus ends, after Where I come from (2014) and A woman, my mother (2019), a trilogy of personal documentaries narrated in the first person and made up of archive images which spanned ten years. Diary of a father However, it becomes his first real filmed diary, since Paul-Claude Demers also shows himself in his Montreal apartment, while his daughter is in Berlin and he would like to watch over her. In voiceover, he addresses his daughter and his deceased father simultaneously, as if to heal from both absences at once.
The project was born following the filmmaker’s breakup with the girl’s mother, a German, who returned to her country with the little one to be closer to her family, he told the media. The separation proved all the more trying because it took place, like the filming of the film, during the COVID-19 pandemic — Paul-Claude Demers not having been able to visit his daughter as often as he did. he would have liked it.
Nostalgic beauty
This is why, listing activities that he would have wanted to do with her if life had not separated them, he shows us other children in a Montreal park, a device with nostalgic beauty to which is added the delicacy of his black and white compositions. Color (or in this case their absence) also allows him to better juxtapose his own images with those of filmmakers he admires, notably Ingmar Bergman and Wim Wenders. Demers likes to divert its meaning, projecting his desires and his anxieties onto it, for example associating his story with that of Philip Winter ofAlice in the Cities.
Other associations, particularly in the text of the narration, however prove unconvincing, such as his invocation of Primo Levi or the dubious link he makes between the cave painting and his daughter’s drawings. Ditto for the film’s strange first scene, where an abstract underwater view suggests amniotic fluid, while Demers reads an imaginary letter addressed to his child a few months before his birth. But the filmmaker clearly embraces the eclecticism of his editing, whose dreaminess and slowness we appreciate, apart from a few lengths.
It is even in the editing that the strength of Paul-Claude Demers’ work lies, who here gives a historical dimension to his story by integrating reconstructions, real or imagined, of family archives. In the paradoxically tender and severe gaze of the actor David Portelance playing his adoptive father, who was very distant, we recognize too many fathers of his generation. And we understand the narrator who says: “As a child, I felt alone when I was with my father. Like him, perhaps, with his own father. » Fortunately, Demers does more than free himself from this painful transmission of solitude, he emancipates himself from it.