Up the River With Acid review – intimate, abstract portrait of a father’s dementia | Movies
HOrest is an elderly academic who lived a full life, enriching it with learning, education and love; Now his son, film director Harald Hutter, has decided to create an intimate, often abstract, experimental documentary portrait of his father on 16mm film. The film takes place over two days, without talking about it much, which is his father’s experience with dementia, and the gradual dismantling of the intellectual faculties that had been so important to him throughout his life. In a sense, the film is about the process of erosion: dementia is not a static state, but a gradual slide, and not even a linear slide at that. Horst has better days and some memories that remain clear, even as other important aspects of his life fall from him like sand in an hourglass.
Horst’s house is the main location of the film and serves as a visual metaphor for his condition. He shares it with his wife, and she has fallen into a state of disrepair, one half of a shabby chic duality in which shabby gradually, little by little, encroaches on chic. There are entire walls full of beautiful books, the fruits of academic life, but there are also strips of wallpaper peeling from the wall. Hutter includes many shots of beautiful, elegant furniture filled with poorly organized papers, an evocation of a life that still has much of the external shape and structure it always had, but whose internal organizing principles are beginning to go awry.
Perhaps the topic most relatable to many people, whether approaching this topic from the point of view of the parent or the child, is the relationship between Horst and his wife. They talk about how they met in Canada at a time when German was their only common language. When Horst says “tell me” after being asked if he can remember their first times together, there is a sense that he is asking because he can no longer remember, but also because he enjoys hearing her tell their story. It’s heartbreaking, but also touching.
