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Trailer for "Family Law"

Those of us who have complex relationships with our parents—by which I mean all of us—will appreciate the anxieties of Ariel Perelman (Daniel Hendler), the young law professor at the center of the new Argentine movie, Family Law. Ariel’s dad, Perelman Sr. (Arturo Goetz), is a successful attorney and charming schmoozer who weaves in and out of courtrooms and client’s offices with a light, suave touch. He knows just what gifts to get for the secretaries in every office in town, and has a prodigious memory for birthdays and anniversaries; in return, he never has to wait in line for anyone or anything.

Ariel has wisely decided not to follow in his father’s socially skilled footsteps: Who could compete—to use his phrase—with that “Zelig of lawyers”? As an academic, Ariel studies the world from a safe distance instead of circulating in the thick of it. He marries a bright ex-student, a Pilates instructor, and they have a baby boy. He goes through the motions of playing husband and father, but deep down his heart’s not quite in it. He realizes (reluctantly) that he needs to close the emotional distance with his dad in order to face up to his own duties as father and husband.

This is the third movie Daniel Burman has made about fatherhood. The lead actor in all of them is Burman’s alter ego, Daniel Hendler. For their previous film, Lost Embrace, which played in the Jewish Film Festival in Buffalo last year, Hendler won the best actor award at Berlin. The director and actor are both in their early 30s and they even resemble each other; given the consistent theme of the films, I’m tempted to guess that the actor is a stand-in for the man behind the camera.

The late Robert Altman once said that he had spent his whole life making one long movie. What he meant was that no matter what the stories or characters, he used every one of his films to work through the same themes and ideas that were dear to him as a person. I’m conjecturing that Burman makes highly personal films intended to do just that.

What is captivating about Family Law is not just the vividly plausible story or the detailed characters but its style, the manner in which it traces its narrative. This is a brisk film with brief, crisp scenes. For Burman, the camera is like a microscope, an instrument to magnify the human face and body and register its every passing feeling or movement. He frames people tightly and shoots them in unyielding close-ups. When people move, he darts in with a zoom lens, keeping them in full view. The result is that the most revealing moments in the movie are wordless; sometimes, the way a person breaks eye contact, conceals a half-smile or sighs silently gives us more information than dialogue can.

Family Law is a deft example of that tricky hybrid, the dramatic comedy. Like that contemporary master of the form, Wes Anderson, Burman has created a film that works in a deceptively simple fashion. The laughs come quickly and generously, but the heft of the drama lies in wait, sneaking up on you a day or two later and leaving you with an unshakable melancholy.