Movie review: Some Kind Of Love an intimate family portrait

By Jay Stone

“What is family?,” asks Thomas Burstyn at the start of Some Kind of Love, a documentary about his accomplished, eccentric, and squabbling aunt and uncle, and also about his own struggles with the idea of kin. The question doesn’t quite get answered in Some Kind of Love, which veers off into half-formed memories, discussions about whether documentaries can ever tell the truth, and a glimpse into a brilliantly dysfunctional household in which a brother and sister live in constant, literate combat.

That’s pretty good for 78 minutes, but by the end, you kind of wish someone would have made the other movie too.

Burstyn is a Vancouver-based filmmaker whose parents fled the Nazi occupation in Europe and settled in Canada. He skims across the surface of their disaffection: they seem happy in a few home movies he shows, but his memories are of a cold household. For unexplained reasons, he is also estranged from his brother, to whom he has not spoken in years. “It was if family as a concept was broken in me,” he says, somewhat cryptically.

The living illustration of all that — broken concepts, the way home movies (of which Some Kind Of Love is an example) can alter perceptions — is found in London. There, Burstyn visits his step-aunt Yolanda Sonnabend, a world-renowned artist and designer for the Royal Ballet. A later scene in which she visits a rehearsal of Swan Lake shows work of breathtaking artistry. She lives in what Burstyn calls a “magical house of chaos,” jammed with painting supplies, books, knick-knacks and the flotsam and jetsam of a slightly distracted English artist. “I like the fact of arranging rubbish to be coherent,” she says.

Another viewpoint is expressed by Joseph Sonnabend, Yolanda’s brother and a physician famous for his work in AIDS research as a microbiologist in New York City (he coined the phrase “unsafe sex.”) He finds Yolanda tiresome, untalented, self-involved and a poor housekeeper to boot. He criticizes her portraits. He calls her interior design the fantasies of an infant. “It’s charming as long as you can leave,” he tells Burstyn, yet he stays in her house because he has no place else to go, it seems — he is estranged from his children — and because he happens to own half of it. He also feels responsible for caring for Yolanda, in his way. Duty, says Sonnabend, is even greater than love.

Burstyn comes into this maelstrom of resentments with his camera and a curiosity about who he is, or maybe just where he came from, and he finds a disturbing and candid reality. Or does he? Joseph Sonnabend is against the making of the film, arguing that the presence of a camera changes the way people behave.

“The camera lies,” says Joseph. “Everything that really matters happens just outside the frame.”

The resulting movie, shot in verite style with the low production values often associated with “truth,” is compelling as the introduction to some fascinating personalities; Joseph Sonnabend, for one, is at once magnificently cranky, ineffably sad, and marvelously creative. Overall, though, it’s a bit like Yolanda’s apartment, jammed with the bric-a-brac of half-glimpsed ideas. It could have used some good coherent arranging.
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