Marianne
Hertz might be the worst mother seen on film since Mommie Dearest, but at least Faye Dunway’s Joan Crawford was
committed to parenthood on some level. Hertz apparently consigned her son Rob
Fassaert to an orphanage for several years, like it was a couple hours of
daycare. You could also call her a problematic grandmother for vastly different
reasons as viewers will see in Tom Fassaert’s excruciatingly uncomfortable
documentary, A Family Affair (trailer here), which opens this
Friday in New York.
Do
not confuse this film with the Brian Keith sitcom or the Sly Stone greatest
hit. Fassaert’s Family Affair is the
sort of doc that is so revealing, it goes past voyeurism to become a
masochistic form of art cinema. When Rob Fassaert was three, he and his older
brother Rene were given up for adoption. A few years later, Hertz reclaimed
them, but she would be an unyieldingly cold and judgmental mother from that
point on. As a child, the filmmaker assumed his father was an orphan, until his
grandmother suddenly swept into their lives—and swept out just as quickly. Not
surprisingly, his father still wrestles with issues of neglect and abandonment,
while his uncle is a basically a shell of a man. Yet, he was intrigued enough
to accept his grandmother’s unexpected invitation to her South African home.
At
this point things really get awkward. As Fassaert struggles to interview Hertz
for the project that will become A Family
Affair, she professes a thoroughly creepy romantic interest in her grown grandson.
It might be more a function of her extreme vanity or perhaps a desire to
inflict further pain on her sons, but it is just gross.
Oh,
but the Fassaert-Hertz family is just getting started. The documentarian grandson
will briefly humanize his grandmother with revelations of her Jewish heritage
and difficult experiences during WWII, but she undoes it all by really
unveiling her dark side late in the third act. At one point, Hertz taunts
Fassaert claiming he will never really know the truth about their family. Au
contraire, madam. Most viewers will feel like they know more than enough
straight dope on her family—too much, really.
