The death of a parent or the need to move them from the family home has been ripe fodder for filmmakers. From the vitriolic August: Osage County to the gentler One Fine Morning, we see characters wrestling with their past, contending with their present and getting a glimpse of their future. With Everything Must Go, screenwriter and film director Arild Østin Ommundsen has created something more reminiscent of The Meyerowitz Stories: both films focus on three grown-up siblings – two men and a woman – and both use humour to counteract the sadness of the family situation as memories are re-evoked and distant childhood events are gazed on and re-evaluated by adult eyes.
The film opens with the sound of piano playing and a thud as the patriarch plays his final notes. When the family gathers for the funeral, sister Ellen (Silje Salomonsen, the director’s wife and long-time collaborator) wastes no time dealing with the next stage: cleaning out the house and keeping the siblings’ estranged mother (a wonderfully bitchy turn from Liv Bernhoft Osa) at bay. When the mother comes knocking, possibly to lay claim to an inheritance she walked away from years before, there’s a wonderful scene of the three adult kids racing around the house and hiding.
Ommundsen deftly outlines each sibling: Ellen is the grown-up, the one who cleaned up after the boys (and still does so, much to her exasperation) and renounced any aspirations, Carl Olav (Torbjørn Berglund Eriksen) is the gifted, troubled man whose prodigal musical talent appears to have completely left him, Amund (Tomas Alf Larsen) is the goofy man-child that nobody felt the need to worry about.
As the three children come together to live in their erstwhile home and chuck out the accumulated debris of their lifetime, it is a chance to bond and rediscover each other. While the adults clean out the house, Ellen’s daughter Anna (Billie Østin) is busy piecing together a doll’s house and filling it with furniture. Anna is the only one who wants to salvage anything from the home. She wants to keep her grandfather’s dog, she wants to sleep with the siblings at the house and she wants to hold on to the essence of her grandfather.
As you would expect from a film about a composer and his family, music is a protagonist. Thomas Dybdahl has created a remarkable score that has to span the years and styles in the dead composer’s life. There are atonal pieces, symphonies, dog commercials (used to moving effect later in the film). Dybdahl, who confesses to having ‘stalked’ the director to get him to listen to his music, has established himself as Ommundsen’s go-to composer and the symbiosis between the music and the film is a delight.
This is a fine addition to the family of films about families. It is quietly moving, often extremely funny and will resonate with anyone who has been through something similar in their own life (or who is anticipating the inevitability of it). As the siblings, the trio of grown-up actors are warm and utterly believable and are strongly supported by their older and younger supporting actors. Ommundsen ends this warm, funny film – and this monumental chapter in his characters’ lives – on a positive and forgiving note.
