Three Days with the Family

Half a week with one’s extended family is not a prospect to enliven many of us, especially when the context is the patriarch’s funeral. And Léa (Bonnín), a granddaughter who has returned to Barcelona from Toulouse for the glum event, has more than bereavement to deal with: an unresponsive boyfriend, disparaging cousins and parents who seem unconstitutionally incapable of facing reality all render the old man’s death almost incidental. The failure to communicate is hard to portray on film, but Catalan director Coll keeps us rapt with the help of a swift-moving script, a set of exceptional performances and a camera that slides sneakily into all the places, emotional and geographical, that this buttoned-up family is so unwilling to go. Nina Caplan