The Norwegian director Gunnar Hall Jensen had been a wild youth, damaged by his mentally troubled mother and indifferent, absent father. So when his own son Jonathan was born in 2002, he felt the mix of trepidation and hope for redemption experienced by many rookie dads. \u201cThis new person was my responsibility,\u201d Hall Jensen says at the start of Portrait of a Confused Father, a documentary drawing on the countless hours of footage he took of his child over the next two decades. \u201cWe would be connected until the day I die.\u201d We are told from the outset, however, that their relationship ended tragically early. \u201cNow the connection is gone,\u201d Hall Jensen\u2019s narration continues. \u201cHe is no longer here. Jonathan, my beautiful boy, is dead.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jonathan passed away in 2023, and Hall Jensen chooses to conceal how this happened until the very end of the film. We are led to guess that it was misadventure on the young man\u2019s part, something a better father might have been able to prevent: as Jensen embarks on a chronological, critical analysis of how he reacted to Jonathan\u2019s developing character, every scene bears a bleak portent. Jensen reaches back into the past, to be with his son again and try to discover where they went wrong.<\/p>\n
A young Jonathan. Photograph: BBC\/UpNorth Film\/Gunnar Hall Jensen<\/p>\n
That he never really finds what he searches for makes Portrait an unfortunately elusive and frustrating film, a work that mirrors the open-ended pain of losing someone too soon and not being able to make sense of it. The harsh truth Hall Jensen ends up revealing is that not every life is a coherent narrative with a comforting moral, even when it has been turned into a documentary, and even when the documentarist desperately wants answers. There is a further cruel irony: Hall Jensen doesn\u2019t appear to have had many shortcomings as a father, but any he did have were tied to his wielding of a camera.<\/p>\n
Certainly this is a film with plenty to say about film-makers. Training a lens on a person can be a way to know them more deeply. But that version of them is safely locked behind a screen and, as the images are captured, the camera itself is a barrier between author and subject. \u201cIt was like some kind of protective filter between him and me,\u201d says Hall Jensen of his compulsion to film his boy. The opening shot is of Jonathan crawling across the kitchen floor, chasing us, but we keep moving backwards out of his reach.<\/p>\n
After Hall Jensen\u2019s parenting career endures a shaky start \u2013 as a toddler Jonathan breaks his leg, although whether this is due to his father\u2019s negligence or just bad luck isn\u2019t clear \u2013 he bonds with his son by casting him as a schoolboy version of himself in an autobiographical film. When Jonathan reaches his teens, Hall Jensen takes him to the Canary Islands for a holiday, but the camera comes too because Dad wants to strengthen their relationship by making a documentary in which he quizzes Jonathan about the concept of love.<\/p>\n
Father and son on holiday together. Photograph: BBC\/UpNorth Film\/Gunnar Hall Jensen<\/p>\n