Sofia’s review published on Letterboxd:
A delicately strung sequence of alienation and connection, of absence and reconciliation, of bitterness and gratitude. To be human is to connect and this is a film deeply preoccupied with the tragedy and harmony of interpersonal understanding.
Unravelling before us is a tentative though profound exploration of human relationships, centering on those of a journalist, Johnny, and his somewhat haphazard, initially unintended strivings to reconnect with the family he'd temporarily lost in the gulf of time, disagreements and diverging responsibilities. Here is a man- willfully estranged from his sister after their mother's sickness and death. His tenderly strained reintegration into her and her son's life pulls us into their labyrinthine journey of reconnection, though it is a process necessarily fraught with tensions and the struggles of unresolved conflicts. Here crystalises the unavoidable truth that rifts and tensions entrench themselves within every human relationship.
The boy, Jesse- Johnny's nine year old nephew- can be seen as a kind of bridge, the intermediary to reconcile these interpersonal gulfs. His profound self awareness seems at odds with his young age, the depth of his insight startling and vastly more advanced than those decades older. He speaks of 'the zone of resilience,' of how to recentre ourselves and quell those feelings of agitation and anger we often can't explain or process in ways we should. Can I be the orphan? He plays out a fantasy of neglect and impoverishment, adopting the facade of a parentless child in the moments he feels most absent. Absent from himself perhaps, as well as from his parents, unable to ontologically situate himself, to feel at ease with the home he feels lost in, with the mother he feels misunderstood by and the father he is wrenched away from. And so he invents a past of abuse and abandonment to better justify the sadness and anger he struggles to explain.
The boy's father is revealed to be a man also incredibly bright and creative, though he is saddeningly and frustratingly shackled by bipolar disorder; he oscillates between intense hysteria and paranoia, and frenetic bursts of passionate joy and energy, seeming unable to find an equilibrium. And the boy's mother, Viv, strains herself to the very limit in her strivings to keep a lid on the chaos that threatens to bubble over and spill into whatever semblance of peace she has managed, miraculously, to cultivate. She is a woman grappling with too much, incredibly bright, intelligent, loving, yet struggling to hold onto the reigns of time, to balance responsibilities with relationships and with time for the self.
With her brother's intrusion into the frenzied life of her and her young boy, space and time, along with connection and understanding rearrange themselves into harmony, though not without some perservering disorder. Important within this reharmonising and reconnection are the sacred spaces, where expression is free and unfiltered, unhindered. Spaces like one of the final scenes in the forest, in which Jesse and Johnny shout out to the trees in a liberating, cathartic unburdening of all that was harboured and internalised. These acts of catharsis prove vital to sustaining relations- both with others and with the self. For Johnny, his interminable recording and recounting of the events of the day is a way of processing the jangling of his thoughts, the tangle of his emotions. And for Viv, and her son, scenes of them dancing and singing aloud to dramatic opera and songs of the past reveal their own methods of processing and expression.
One scene reveals the uncle reading a book to the boy, and what the book lays bare is the glaring fact that we often forget where we come from. We come from a place of stillness and darkness, from our mother's womb, and so of course we will often feel unbearably exposed and overwhelmed in a world that teems with a cacaphony of sensations, colours, noises, lights. What the film traces is that oscillating, ebbing and flowing, labyrinthine journey through this wonderfully jarring existence, exposing the connections we forge along this thread, the struggles and understandings we endure and create. To know and understand oneself, and those around us, is a precious truth of humanity and C'mon C'mon is a film that examines this with tender and unwavering willingness, laying bare our prevailing need to connect and fill the gulfs of absence we threaten to tumble into.