Photographer Richard Billingham made a name for himself with alarming autobiographical photos of his family- his alcoholic father and obese, tattooed mother in England.
This film expands on that by plunging the audience into the squalid house, with Liz (Ella Smith/Deirdre Kelly) plunked down doing Jigsaw puzzles on the table and smoking furiously, and poor husband Ray (Justin Salinger/Patrick Romer) lying in bed (in flash-forwarded sequences) with bottles lined up on his bureau, in a room filled with wasps. The children fend for themselves, while a menagerie of animals- dogs, hamsters, birds, rabbits pee all over.
But there’s a pitch-dark humor to all of it. There are also incredible sequences- when the young boy ends up sleeping rough in a shed on a freezing night, and an end sequence with the father’s weathered face and a Dusty Springfield song playing in the background- that elevates all the nightmarish squalor into art. An amazing film. This opens July 10th at The Film Forum.
