‘The Bad Father’ San Sebastian Review: A Family Confronts Decades Of Estrangement

In the Argentina of my childhood, in the ’70s and, especially, the ’80s, there were two terms used interchangeably to describe the same thing —terms that, underneath it all, stood for something different: telenovela and teleteatro. For many they were synonyms, shorthand for what would eventually collapse into the first of the two categories. But at a somewhat deeper, maybe even academic level, there were real distinctions between them. The teleteatro was something like the more adult version of the telenovela: more recognized writers, more respected actors, a formal and thematic structure a touch more serious than the classic soap opera. It drew more from theater than from the serialized potboiler. It was the nighttime iteration, pitched at the middle class rather than the working-class audiences the afternoon telenovelas courted.

I found myself thinking about those teleteatros of yesteryear while watching The Bad Father, a Spanish dramatic comedy that, in theme as much as in its narrative, structural, and audiovisual choices, shares a great deal with that genre. It aspires to be more than the popular telenovela, but underneath, the differences are pretty blurry, and they come down mostly to the film’s vain aspiration to be something else. Supposedly it tackles other subjects, in a more elaborated way (more dialogue, essentially) and with loftier ambitions, but look closely and the differences are pure froth — a matter of socioeconomic dressing rather than any intrinsic logic separating the conflicts on display.

The Bad Father edges toward that format on two fronts: the plot itself, and even the characters running through it, seem —beyond some updates for the sake of political correctness— pulled straight from the 1980s, a pile-up of family situations and traumas that rarely escapes the clichés of a bourgeois family dragging its problems across the decades. Here, as the genre demands from its more theatrical side, everything comes out into the open across a series of confrontational encounters between a difficult, absent father and his three emotionally battered adult children.

Eduard Fernández plays Santiago Balmes, the family patriarch, a recently retired professor who has always had a fraught relationship with his three children —children who have more or less stopped seeing him since he left their mother for another woman decades earlier. But the man has received a harsh diagnosis that predicts he’ll lose his faculties before long, so he summons all three to spend the holidays at his luxurious summer house. The three arrive with every possible reservation and, amid pretty scenery, good food, and plenty of good liquor, the five characters (plus a few others who drift in and out of frame) will relitigate their respective histories, kicking off a family psychodrama that stretches out, through fits and starts and more fits and starts, over two hours.

The one who guides the viewer through the story, offering his point of view on the conflict, is Alberto (Adam Jezierski), the youngest of the three siblings but the first to become a father himself — a schoolteacher who faces the imminent arrival of his daughter with more doubts and fears than his own wife. Those fears have a history, and they’re tied to his relationship with his own father. Meritxell Calvo plays the middle sister, a successful businesswoman and the one who most openly despises papa Santiago. And Francesco Carril plays the older brother, an independent theater actor whose personal and professional life has not, at least by the family’s standards, gone well.

Across a string of tense encounters —in some cases the family is joined by friends of the father, in another the daughter from his second marriage shows up, and later some of the siblings’ partners arrive— the family traumas unspool, nearly all of them condensed into the idea that this Santiago only ever cared about his career, his writing, and his personal misadventures, and never looked after, attended to, or even outright scorned his three children. And all three, each in their own way, return that scorn in kind. It’s the approach of a terminal illness that drives them to air every piece of dirty laundry until there’s nothing left hidden anywhere in the house.

The conflicts never stray from the genre’s style guide, and aside from a few period-specific twists, they’re not all that different from what might have happened in a similar film 40 or more years ago. The same goes for the bittersweet tone of the whole exercise, one that starts out comic before turning aggressive, even violent, and finally somewhat reconciliatory. It’s hard to find any degree of originality or realism anywhere in the film. From the staging and the choice of locations onward, we’re in territory that belongs to classic drama —the kind that could easily have worked on a theater stage, given the wordiness, the acting style, and the way the dialogue stretches on until it becomes nearly endless.

There are a few clever jokes, a couple of powerful moments, and the odd sharp observation about the difficulties (and the mistakes) of poorly understood fatherhood —or fatherhood as it used to be understood decades ago— but even with those fingers the film presses into the wound, The Bad Father almost never manages to break free of the predictable and the overused, of the sentimental and the emotionally manipulative, and, at bottom, of just how conservative the whole proposal ends up being, forcing a reconciliation that seems all but impossible with a man who is, by any measure, fairly indefensible. Roberto Bueso’s film can’t help justifying a monstrous character simply because failing health starts to make him look fragile, as if one small, belated flicker of empathy could wipe away decades of contempt and indifference toward almost everyone around him.