Portrait of a Confused Father

“Any good parent knows that raising a child, building their character, is a life’s work — giving them wings to fly, as they say, a cliché you’ll just have to forgive because it’s so apt when reflecting on the raw, honest and devastating film Portrait of a Confused Father, shown in BBC4’s Storyville strand. The Norwegian film-maker Gunnar Hall Jensen spent 21 years documenting his only son, Jonathan, ultimately offering a kind of macro view of a father-son relationship — of the bonding during the childhood years, then a distancing as adolescence turns to adulthood. It is also revealed right at the start that Jonathan is dead. We didn’t find out how until the end, but tragedy hangs over everything like a darkening cloud. In that context the film became instead a father’s “struggle for answers that may never end” as he reflects, in calm Norwegian tones, on the attributes he instilled in Jonathan. Ones that fostered the boy’s brimming sense of ambition and adventure, yet which would eventually tip into recklessness.”
James Jackson, The Times

“After Hall Jensen’s parenting career endures a shaky start – as a toddler Jonathan breaks his leg, although whether this is due to his father’s negligence or just bad luck isn’t clear – 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. This sequence is the film’s most memorable, boasting a sun-haze melancholy that resembles the movie Aftersun with the generations flipped; mostly, though, it’s notable for how normal Jonathan’s eventual disgruntlement with the project is. When he yells at his dad for asking vague, pretentious questions that will make them both look silly, the lad’s got a point. Watching Portrait of a Confused Father, it’s easy to lose patience with Hall Jensen as a storyteller. He never fully interrogates his mother or his own recurrent feelings of emptiness, while the almost total absence of his wife is left unexplained. And although on a personal level it’s entirely understandable, for the success of the film it’s still problematic that dark hindsight casts a shadow over all Hall Jensen’s memories of Jonathan, making him present normal teen blow-ups as harbingers of catastrophe.”
Jack Seale, The Guardian

“Gunnar’s narration was fiercely honest, but nevertheless lacked insight. He didn’t seem to realise, as he filmed Jonathan at 15, dancing almost naked and lip-synching to R&B ballads, that the boy was questioning his nascent sexuality. When Jonathan came out as gay, he was blindsided — just as he was when the young man was seduced by the woman-hating, body-building ethos of the ‘manosphere’. The painful truth of this film is that a father’s love can withstand any amount of rejection and forgive everything. But sometimes, even that isn’t enough.”
Christopher Stevens, Daily Mail