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5 hours ago
4
The Norwegian director Gunnar Hall Jensen had been a wild youth, damaged by his mentally troubled mother and indifferent, absent father. So when his own son Jonathan was born in 2002, he felt the mix of trepidation and hope for redemption experienced by many rookie dads. “This new person was my responsibility,” Hall Jensen says at the start of Portrait of a Confused Father, a documentary drawing on the countless hours of footage he took of his child over the next two decades. “We would be connected until the day I die.” We are told from the outset, however, that their relationship ended tragically early. “Now the connection is gone,” Hall Jensen’s narration continues. “He is no longer here. Jonathan, my beautiful boy, is dead.”
Jonathan passed away in 2023, and Hall Jensen chooses to conceal how this happened until the very end of the film. We are led to guess that it was misadventure on the young man’s part, something a better father might have been able to prevent: as Jensen embarks on a chronological, critical analysis of how he reacted to Jonathan’s developing character, every scene bears a bleak portent. Jensen reaches back into the past, to be with his son again and try to discover where they went wrong.
That he never really finds what he searches for makes Portrait an unfortunately elusive and frustrating film, a work that mirrors the open-ended pain of losing someone too soon and not being able to make sense of it. The harsh truth Hall Jensen ends up revealing is that not every life is a coherent narrative with a comforting moral, even when it has been turned into a documentary, and even when the documentarist desperately wants answers. There is a further cruel irony: Hall Jensen doesn’t appear to have had many shortcomings as a father, but any he did have were tied to his wielding of a camera.
Certainly this is a film with plenty to say about film-makers. Training a lens on a person can be a way to know them more deeply. But that version of them is safely locked behind a screen and, as the images are captured, the camera itself is a barrier between author and subject. “It was like some kind of protective filter between him and me,” says Hall Jensen of his compulsion to film his boy. The opening shot is of Jonathan crawling across the kitchen floor, chasing us, but we keep moving backwards out of his reach.
After Hall Jensen’s parenting career endures a shaky start – as a toddler Jonathan breaks his leg, although whether this is due to his father’s negligence or just bad luck isn’t clear – he bonds with his son by casting him as a schoolboy version of himself in an autobiographical film. When Jonathan reaches his teens, Hall Jensen takes him to the Canary Islands for a holiday, but the camera comes too because Dad wants to strengthen their relationship by making a documentary in which he quizzes Jonathan about the concept of love.
This sequence is the film’s most memorable, boasting a sun-haze melancholy that resembles the movie Aftersun with the generations flipped; mostly, though, it’s notable for how normal Jonathan’s eventual disgruntlement with the project is. When he yells at his dad for asking vague, pretentious questions that will make them both look silly, the lad’s got a point. Watching Portrait of a Confused Father, it’s easy to lose patience with Hall Jensen as a storyteller. He never fully interrogates his mother or his own recurrent feelings of emptiness, while the almost total absence of his wife is left unexplained. And although on a personal level it’s entirely understandable, for the success of the film it’s still problematic that dark hindsight casts a shadow over all Hall Jensen’s memories of Jonathan, making him present normal teen blow-ups as harbingers of catastrophe.
Even when Jonathan turns 18, grabs his independence and starts behaving somewhat abnormally – he and his best friend become zealous digital entrepreneurs, flirt with the manosphere and relocate to Brazil – his video calls to his dad are remarkably forthcoming, displaying a closeness and trust that many fathers would envy. When Jonathan’s death proves to be more brutally random than we have been invited to assume, it turns the film into a meditation on parents’ tendency to worry that they have done a bad job, when they probably haven’t. If Portrait of a Confused Father is to give Hall Jensen a way through his grief, it might be that people will see it and tell him.
