The Year of the Difficult Dad

A triad of films this year spotlights stories of estranged daughters navigating the overbearing egos of toxic, difficult fathers

The great auteurs loom large in our collective imaginations. Look back through the years, and you’ll be greeted with a long line of Important Artists – towering, imposing, and, for the most part, male. Look a little closer, though, and you may see other hazy figures lurking on the outskirts. Almost a century ago, Virginia Woolf presented a thought experiment in her seminal A Room of One’s Own: if Shakespeare had a sister, and if she was a writer, would we know her work? (No: she’d be too busy cleaning and mending and cooking and having babies and generally facilitating the art made by the men in her life, of course.) Though we’ve made strides, Woolf’s point remains shockingly relevant: who gets to make art within a family and how does that art get to be made? A new slew of films this year ask us to reconsider the great male auteur through the eyes not of his sister, but rather his daughter.

Joaquim Trier’s Sentimental Value and Rodrigo Sorogoyen’s The Beloved paint portraits of renowned film directors facing up to their failings as their grown-up daughters take on roles in their films. Meanwhile, in Paweł Pawlikowski’s Fatherland, real-life novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) is forced to reckon with his shortcomings when presented with the perspective of his daughter Erika (Sandra Hüller), a writer in her own right. In each story, we see a daughter serving the artistic vision of her father – and each collaboration paves the way for a destabilising personal and artistic reckoning.

In Fatherland, Thomas and Erika embark on a heavy father-daughter roadtrip. It’s 1949 and Thomas is taking his manifesto on the “new Germany” on tour during his first trip back to the country since he fled amid the rise of fascism before the war. In tow is Erika, his assistant, but also editor, translator, coach, administrator, stylist, and press manager all-in-one. When they receive some traumatic family news, Thomas buries himself deeper in his work, leaving Erika to pick up the emotional labour and reflect on the efficacy of her father’s mission. Pawlikowski lets the growing tension, both of an ideological and personal nature, build between them in a series of unspoken moments: A car ride clouded with tense silence. A party where Erika, alone, eyes her father amid a throng of fans.

This interrogation of the ego of the male artist, of his inability to face up to real trauma, is a common theme across this year’s father-daughter films. In Sentimental Value, director Gustav Borg (Stellan Skarsgård) wants his daughter Nora (Renate Reinsve) to take on a role inspired by his own mother in a film about her suicide. Despite his egotistical attempt to grapple with how this trauma affected him, he seems unable to face up to his own role as an absent father in Nora and her sister’s lives. 

In a similar vein, The Beloved sees director Esteban Martinez (Javier Bardem) avoiding the difficult truth that he abandoned his daughter Emilia (Victoria Luengo) and her mother in pursuit of his own artistic ambition. Feeling guilty, perhaps, he invites Emilia to star in his next film. As production gets underway, the layers of pain, resentment and regret between them unravel in brutal ways. In one particularly unpleasant scene, Gustav terrorises his cast, forcing them to film a dinner party scene over and over again. When Emilia calls him out, he demands she eat and eat and eat until she’s almost sick.

There is a common pattern across these films: daughters left behind by their brilliant fathers and these fathers returning to their daughters a little too late, when the niggling guilt becomes unavoidable. Erika and her siblings are unable to compete with Thomas Mann’s obsession with his own art. Klaus, his son, was a needy boy, Thomas says in a moment of anger. “I wonder why,” comes Erika’s retort. These are portraits of daughters desperate to win love that wasn’t freely given – no psychology degree needed to see why they follow in their fathers’ footsteps. But when these father-daughter pairs do work together, the truth must out.

After days of silence, Erika’s viewpoint comes out in a short, sharp exchange. Thomas is a “cold-hearted narcissist,” she exclaims, too obsessed with his own legacy to face up to real trauma. Nora, too, is clear-sighted about her father’s shortcomings. After he gives a diatribe on how “artists need freedom” to create anything valuable, she asks him if he means they can’t have children. “You two are the best thing that happened to me,” he says hollowly. “Then why weren’t you there?” she demands. And Emilia finally forces her father to look at himself clearly too. “Answer me without stories. Do you know what it meant to me that you’re not in my life?” she asks him in their final scene together. “Yes,” he can only reply.

Each daughter reveals an uncomfortable truth to her father: that his art, though brilliant, might just have been his own way of avoiding his own failings – both as an artist and as a father. This father-daughter artist trope comes at an interesting time. Our collective relationship to the great male artists of both past and present is shifting. So, too, are the expectations we place on a new generation of fathers. It’s worth noting that these three films are directed by men – men who perhaps have felt the impact of these shifts. It is no longer acceptable to allow women in the family to facilitate art, then disappear when they’re no longer needed. Similarly, young women are no longer able to accept poor parenting from fathers simply because they happen to be men with artistic ambition. Each film offers a portrait of this shift as older generations, particularly men, find themselves facing up to new ideas and new standards from the women in their lives. After all, who better to hold up a mirror than their daughters?

Ultimately, each film resists the urge to condemn outright but seeks to push back against the misogyny embedded in the cult of male artistry and find new ways of doing things. The problems are exposed and, in the end, imperfect solutions are found. Fathers and daughters struggle on, finding a way forward on shaky new footing. Emilia and Esteban share a tearful farewell on the final day of filming. Nora and Gustav actually begin their project and manage to share a smile. Thomas finds a way to experience his pain and Erika is right there with him. A generational shift such as this one can be confronting. But perhaps we will be left with better art – and better fathers – as a result.