OVID.TV Presents FAMILY LIFE Film Review — Humorous Home Sitting in Chile

A man dressed as an upright professor crawls on all fours over couches and under tables whispering “Mississippi”. His attire suggests dignity; his rapid wriggling across the floor suggests clown. Such is the life of Martín, long-known as the family screw-up. He is searching for his classy cousin Bruno's cat. Bruno and his family had traveled to France for one year, entrusting  Martín to look after their home. Now being one of Martín’s only living relatives, Bruno takes a chance on his bum of a cousin who he has grown apart from in the past twenty years. The comic antics ensue.

Martín is entropy personified. He has both disrupted the order of the home and the order of the lives surrounding him. Bookshelves perfectly organized by color are dismantled, books are strewn about the floor in chaos. Martín paws through every closet within the house, tossing clothes about. He even rearranges furniture. All this occurs accompanied by serene classical music as the backdrop, sometimes shifting to cerebral jazz. The only exception to this pattern is when Martín himself chooses the music, always hard rock, that seems to project his inner chaos into sound.

Family Life takes place over the course of a year allowing us to witness a bored Martín day after day. He never ceases to find something to disrupt in the home, even when no reason or logic is clear. When Martín is not creating mass chaos that never failed to make this reviewer smile, we join him whiling away his time with Pachi, living an ever more elaborate lie. Like this writer, you too may become attached to the characters as they grow into themselves, or in Martín’s case, an idealized version of himself.