There are many shades of loneliness, but the tatty gray isolation of a seaside town in the off-season provides a peculiarly perfect background hue for two bereaved late-teenage siblings in Argentinian director’s elusively offbeat “Family Members.
Following the death of their mother, the circumstances of which we learn about only gradually and elliptically, Gilda and Lucas return to the coastal town where she lived to spread her remains in accordance with her wishes. But instead of ashes, all they have is her prosthetic hand, which bobs forlornly on the waves after they throw it in.
Seventeen-year-old Lucas, slight and pale, has developed an interest in bodybuilding and strikes up a friendship, which blossoms haltingly into a sexual relationship, with local Guido whom he meets at the outdoor gym. Twenty-year-old Gilda is just out of rehab, claims to be dating some “great guy” whom Lucas suspects to be fictional, and is dabbling in any cobbled-together spiritual solution, from chakra stones to tarot cards, that catches her passing fancy.
DP Roman Kasseroller’s muted cinematography captures the liminal psychology of these drifting characters perfectly, washing the images of bright colors and suspending them instead in a cool half-light that is neither cheerful nor depressing. And though Gilda and Lucas’ directionlessness can feel at times listless, it is occasionally spotlit by touches of the surreal, which are seamlessly worked into the narrative by Ana Godoy’s crisp but lyrical editing.
But that is clearly not Bendesky’s ultimate aim as he is more interested in the delicate evocation of loss, and the dizzying disorientation and dissociation that grief can entail, especially when the mourner’s own identity is already in a state of flux.