Peter Bradshaw 

Should Terry Gilliam’s The Wholly Family have mixed business with pasta?

Peter Bradshaw: A new short feature from Terry Gilliam, which we'll be streaming on this site, has been funded by an Italian pasta company. So, is it a film or an advert, or both? And how satisfying is this 20-minute morsel?
  
  

Terry Gilliam
Mamma mia! ... Terry Gilliam's new short film, The Wholly Family, has been entirely funded by the Garofolo Pasta company. Photograph: Richard Saker Photograph: Richard Saker

It hasn't been that long since Shane Meadows made a short feature with commercial sponsorship; Eurostar stumped up the cash for his drama Somers Town, and the company was rewarded with very prominent branding and plot involvement. Not everyone was thrilled that a film-maker should take the commercial shilling. My colleague David Cox sharply pointed out that Eurostar's corporate practices were given a rosy fictional glow.

Now Terry Gilliam has moved into this arena with a new 20-minute short film, to be distributed online. It has been entirely funded by the Garofolo Pasta company, an Italian firm based in Gragnano near Naples, where the film is set.

Gilliam has spoken glowingly of how Garofolo gave him complete freedom: more freedom than any studio would dream of allowing him. And perhaps in the future there will be many more legendary directors like Gilliam, who have rightly or wrongly found that their ultra-fashionable moment has passed and are finding fewer and fewer conventional movie moneymen willing to give them the accustomed latitude. So finding a commercial sponsor and putting your (modestly budgeted) work up online could be the way to go for auteurs who just wish to continue making movies.

This amiable, knockabout, surreal comedy-adventure is about a tense married couple taking a disastrous romantic break in Naples, where they first met: they quarrel endlessly, their nerves frayed by their young son Jake acting up, and there is an emotional meltdown just where a stallholder is selling Pulcinella-style dolls and religious figurines of Joseph, Mary and Jesus, whose seraphic contentment is so ironically different from the flesh-and-blood trio. The boy steals a doll, gets sent to bed without any supper and his pasta dreams become very dark. The film is quibblingly entitled The Wholly Family – although the pun would surely have worked better (or, in fact, worked) without the definite article.

Well, there's film-making with a commercial sponsor, and there are film-makers who have made commercials: David Lynch directed an ad for Sony, Wes Anderson made one for Amex and Jonathan Glazer (before he became known as a movie director) made the Guinness Surfer ad with the giant horses in the waves. Terry Gilliam himself made ads for Nike.

Which category does The Wholly Family come into? It could slot into both. Think of it as just a film, and it might seem pretty saccharine. But think of it as an advertisement – although Gilliam does not like The Wholly Family to be thought of in this way – and its gloomier side registers much more prominently.

When the nightmare clown figure rams little Jake into his stomach, it is unsettling and bizarre, more than if he had simply eaten him. Jack is taken on a queasy ride into his own past: we see his parents' severed heads on platters and he winds up in an eerily white maternity hospital with perspective lines which reminded me of the Python film The Meaning of Life. Jake is to witness himself as a baby, getting born from an egg, and seeing for himself that what is also being born is his parents' disenchantment with each other. They have fallen out of love and it is his fault – an epiphany which coincides with a genuinely nasty image as his mother, in the first stages of post-natal depression, reacts against the newborn.

These dark thoughts are, of course, erased at the end, but not before Gilliam has given us a hint of his wayward dream-logic and boisterous setpieces. It's in some ways closest in style to his most successful recent film, the 2005 feature Tideland.

It's a diverting way to spend 20 minutes. But the product is ironic. Pasta is what other more workaday directors give us. Gilliam is more about the sauce.

• We'll be streaming The Wholly Family on this site from 23 January. Peter Bradshaw will be interviewing Terry Gilliam in the Guardian offices that evening. This event is now sold out.

• This article was amended on 11 January. The original said Jake was called Jack. This has been corrected.

 

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