By Meah C. Petersen
Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of attending a special screening of His Three Daughters (2023) as a part of the FMS weekly screening series. At this particular screening, there was a talkback and Q&A with the film’s writer-director, Azazel Jacobs. It was very special to be able to hear some insight on Jacobs’s creative process in such a personal setting, especially considering he is a former student of Purchase. Graduating in 1994 from the film conservatory, Jacobs went on to write and direct a number of films that have received acclaim from critics and institutions such as the Sundance Film Festival and the Independent Spirit Awards. As a critical film watcher and a final-semester senior at Purchase, I find great significance in holding events where our faculty can host working alumni from Purchase’s academic programs. Having the ability to ask questions and understand someone’s work alongside them is a very unique privilege. It is both inspiring and reassuring to see someone who was once in your shoes as an academic in that creative position of prominence. The experience is all the more encouraging to me as someone preparing to leave academia and enter a post-undergraduate artistic landscape for the first time.
As for the film itself, His Three Daughters is a brilliant execution in spatial recognition and understanding. The film follows three sisters, Rachel, Christina and Katie, reunited in their childhood apartment to prepare themselves for the legalities and processes of their father’s soon inevitable death from cancer. During the talkback, Azazel Jacobs mentioned that the whole film was shot on location in a real apartment building. The way the camera is used as an extra pair of eyes, or just a presence rather, watching the family as they not only mourn, but also move about the space they occupy in the apartment, feels so deeply intimate. We really only leave the apartment a handful of times throughout the film, and all but one of those times was to see Rachel sit on a bench right outside the building. The apartment is the center of the narrative, and it is just as much a character as it is a setting. The use of natural light allows the colors of the morning and evening to spill into the apartment through the bay windows. The diegetic sound from cars driving by, wind whistling, and subway cars speeding past overhead add to this ambience of realism. Every visual aspect of the film was nothing short of beautiful, even the smallest of visual details felt as though they came from considerate intention.
There is much to say about the dimension to which Jacobs writes this family dynamic, and however amazing that was, I found the structural elements much more interesting than that of the thematic. Jacobs mentioned that he wrote the role of each sister with the actresses who played them, Carrie Coon, Natasha Lyonne, and Elizabeth Olsen, in mind. Because of this, much of the dialogue is written in a way that feels specifically theatrical; it felt as though I was listening to the script of a play. This is only emphasized by the claustrophobia of the setting; limiting the locations lead me to imagine the kind of set that would be created if this film were instead a stage production. I’ve seen negative critiques about the tendency in His Three Daughters to write characters to speak fast, seemingly without direction, and to slide into laborious monologues. I found this detail charming while many found it nonsensical. Personally, it felt like a love letter to the traditional family drama, especially made for the stage. It oddly reminded me of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun, the way it allowed the family to both clash with and embrace one another in a time of awkward grief. While the film sometimes struggles to grab the viewer’s empathetic gaze, it successfully provides relatability to a viewer above anything else. At its core, His Three Daughters is a story about mourning; the good, the bad, the ugly, and the beautiful. Jacobs said that he had based the story around his own experience with aging and seeing his parents age, as well, leaving behind a string of complicated emotions to navigate through something that can seem so hopeless. It is a lesson in how not to let the things you don’t want to say turn into the things someone will never get to hear. This film and the Q&A that followed the screening has piqued my curiosity in looking at Azazel Jacobs’s other work, and hopefully I get to see some more of it soon. Watching the film with a theater full of young filmmakers, writers, and cinephiles was probably the best part of it all. Experiencing such a profoundly touching film with my peers, eager to find their own space for a project like this one day, left me with a beaming sense of hope. Through cinema, even the most inherently morbid of circumstances can be transformed into a flourishing work of intelligent resilience.
CinemaRoll 