An actress searches to know her deceased father in Invention, an odd narrative/documentary mix.
The father of Carrie Fernandez, played by Callie Hernandez, has recently passed. Slightly estranged before his death, she travels to his home to collect his life, his assets, and an odd patent – the invention of the title. Invention is a bizarre slice of a film of weird connections, finding a history and examining what we know about the people around you, via a strange blending of fiction and documentary.
Invention is off-putting, but engaging; keeping a full connection at an arm’s length away, not unlike the relationship between Callile, playing a “character” of “Carrie Hernandez”, and the recently deceased father. He was a huckster, a salesman, an inventor, and a peddler of pseudo-science cures and ideas, the type hawked on late-night television. This is the type of person who would be both interesting and infuriating to know. Filled with wild ideas and some strange focus elsewhere, not working on our plane of reality. But is it hard to make a true connection, as they flit in and out of lives, never settling into a real pattern? I can’t imagine being a child of someone like that. Director Courtney Stephens, co-writing with Hernandez, gives the idea life, the notion of finding the false layers of your parents, that what they tell you and teach you is at odds with the rest of the world.
The odd tone is set with a certain aesthetic. A low-fi fuzziness pervades, mirroring her memory of her father and his life, or even our personal memories of the far-gone past. The truth of someone’s life is as unfocused as old 16mm home movie film. The unfocused level of knowledge is strengthened by the method of filming. Invention is filmed almost like a documentary. It feels and functions like one; Fernandez and Hernandez share a history, and her/their dad is real;. Her memories are real. Her grief and how she deals with the passing seem real. The clips of his time on television presenting his wares are real. How many of her memories are just as real? When someone dies, even if you don’t know them as well in recent years, memories get set. They can only fade.
Within the documentary framework and style, we catch notes of fiction. Stephens is occasionally seen and heard from the sidelines of the frame, working lines, calling notes, restarting scenes. The performances additionally have a purposeful falseness. They work on a decided monotone. It’s entrancing.
This aspect deepens our mistaken sense of Hernandez’s reality. She’s been left little, some money in a collection of accounts, a home, and from the title: the patent to what seems to be a useless invention, a vibrating series of tubes he claims to heal. It’s something you’d see on old VHS tapes in videos posted by the Found Footage Festival. By all means, it’s nothing but others want it. The strange men and women (performed by other independent filmmakers) who seek out the help and friendship of people like her father. People on the outskirts of society never quite meld with others. There are edges of dangerous conspiracy around them. More unknowable people. Maybe you don’t want to know them.
Maybe you can’t. Everything in Invention is purposely kept at bay, a truth with a layer of false. It won’t be a film for everyone; its style, purposeful lack of focus, and methods will be off-putting for many. But for those on Invention’s wavelength, it’ll be a highlight of oddness in the process of grief.
Invention is presented through the Seattle International Film Festival, running in-person screenings May 15th – 25th and selected online screenings March 26th – June 1st. See Siff.net/festival for more.