‘Temple’ Review: Ricky D’Ambrose’s Masterful Moderation Creates a Family Saga

‘Temple’ Review: Ricky D’Ambrose’s Masterful Moderation Creates a Family Saga

If, as Tolstoy suggested, happy families are all alike, perhaps it is because they are opaque to those of us for whom friction and division are as much a part of the experience of kinship as is love. Jesse, the hyper-observant only child at Ricky D’Ambrose’s center Cathedral, captures every detail of his unhappy family, not just his parents’ divorce when he was 10, not just his father’s constant struggles, financial and otherwise, but also the awkward silences and generational baggage, the celebration of ritual who aspires to grace. . The writer-director-editor’s second low-budget film, now streamed on Mubi, captures remembered interactions and still-life shots with deliberate, elliptical precision, minor notes forming a chord that resonates with the pain of wasted time and unexpressed emotion. . .

Seen through the eyes of the film’s creator’s alter ego, an artist named Jesse Damross, born in 1987, this feature film is set in the last years of the 20th century. Official compositions by DP Barton Cortright, who also photographed D’Ambrose Notes on appearanceBristling with a sad current, as indelible by Terence Davies Distant voices, still alive He washed and rinsed in the Long Island sun.

Cathedral

bottom line

He packs a punch.

in papers: Brian D’Arcy James, Monica Barbaro, Mark Zeisler, Geraldine Singer
Screenwriter Director: Ricky D’Ambrose

1 hour 28 minutes

At the heart of the drama’s fractured family tree is an event that takes place before Jesse’s birth: the death of his father’s brother from AIDS, a subject that the family treats negatively, bordering on delirium, a silent rejection, emblematic for many. . happening in the next few years.

Jesse appears onscreen at age 3 (Hudson McGuire), 9 (Henry Glendon Walter V), 12 (Robert Levy II) and 17 (William Bednar-Carter), sometimes looking directly into Cortright’s camera, his eyes wide and curious. , sometimes with their faces. -to stare. Invisible photographer for class photos and sometimes interacts with parents and other family members. D’Ambrose further sculpts the drama through voice-over narration, with Madeleine James providing background details and on-screen event descriptions with sympathy and authority.

History takes advantage of this sense of omniscience. At first, she is driven by an inverted sense of possibility and beginning: the marriage of Richard Damrosch (a moving Brian D’Arcy James) and Lydia Orkin (a perfectly underdeveloped Monica Barbaro in a more symbolic role) and the birth of their child. . . They buy an apartment in Haylett’s fictional New York City, and he opens a print shop. A friend (Stephen Alonte) provides significant financial support, while Richard’s father (Gorman John Ruggiero) is emotionally absent. As for her stoic and loving mother (Melinda Tanner), she will never get over her death.

There’s even tension in the marriage between Richard and his in-laws, Nick (Mark Zeisler, excellent) and Flora (the wonderful and especially memorable Geraldine Singer). Animosity rages and leads to an explosive confrontation. Meanwhile, the relatively well-adjusted Nick and Flora have simply cut off their relationship with their sister Billie (Cynthia Mace, heartbreaking in her brief screen time), apparently out of concern for her mother, Josephine. He is played by silent actor Candy Dato, who turns out to be an addictive nightmare. Homeless and at the mercy of her children, Josephine spends a brief time with her cruel son (Roy Abramson) and devoted wife (Rosanna Rubino), her self-importance underscored by Shostakovich’s thunderous music.

There are other horrors: for starters, a clown and a ventriloquist who show up at Jessie’s family parties. Some of these meetings take place in banquet halls, a particular aspect of New York’s middle class that Ray Romano explores in a slightly more comedic way. somewhere in queens. Photos of D’Ambroise on a white tablecloth, coffee cups and dessert plates, combined with narration and a subtle voice-over, give absolute poetic pain.

The film’s static and seemingly dispassionate images contain a world of memories, moments in time that persist with a strange urgency, whether we understand their emotional underpinnings or not, and usually because we don’t. Much of the family stuff plays with the voids of the counter-project studied in the bedrooms. Production designer Grace Sloan infuses other interiors with the comfortable feel of long-occupied homes in hostile suburban cities.

D’Ambroise creates a sense of time and place through the clever use of advertisements (for Kodak movies, Statue of Liberty centenary coins) as well as era-defining disaster news footage and other markers of the past. Times: Storm in the desert. ; The crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island; Gary Condit-Chandra Levy scandal; Murder of Daniel Perla; Michael Savage’s sensational political commentary on presidential candidate John Kerry; A grieving Nancy Reagan at her husband’s funeral; Katrina hurricane. Mythmaking, D’Ambros suggests, is embedded in these larger cultural events; In contrast, the Damroshes and the Orkins, like all other American families, maintain their own improvisations.

There are sometimes prickly and often empty conversations at birthday parties, confirmations, and graduations. Jesse seems to be front and center in these meetings, but in fact the weight of the family drama and his insistence on not “trying to work out differences,” in the narrator’s brief description, pushes him into a corner. He was taught at school to move to the “single file room” because it is less of a problem for adults.

Cathedral It reflects the artist’s awakening not only in his paintings and films, which began in adolescence, but also in the way he sees and reacts to the world around him: a book of intricate drawings absorbs him and, later, a photograph becomes a window. in your family history. D’Ambroise’s drama is attuned to the sensitivity of children inside, watching and holding their breath as adults convince themselves they’re not screwing things up.

For Jesse, this means not only his parents’ divorce but his subsequent marriages, bad news in different ways (the new spouses are played by Matthew Hammond and Mixolydia Tyler). And that means knowing how his father, given an exquisite and wounded life by D’Arcy James, struggles for validation and redemption amidst dead ends and explosions and struggles to find words.

Source: Hollywood Reporter

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