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Mysterious mom. Mina Block with her son Doug in a 1959 family photo. The woman behind the shades left behind a treasure trove of personal diaries - or a minefield depending on how you look at it. CONTRIBUTED PHOTO BY MIKE BLOCK
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FAMILY SECRETS
How well do you really know your parents?
FILM REVIEW
'51 BIRCH STREET'
Copacetic Pictures
Directed by Doug Block
88 min.
BY LEN SOUSA
"You're saying I'm like my father?" asks a concerned Doug Block at the start of "51 Birch Street." The director is interviewing his mother, Mina Block, a sprightly 78-year-old with an apparent joie de vie.
"Oh come on now," she replies with a classic Long Island tone of dismissal. "Nothing is ever so direct. Everything is circuitous. It goes around in very unpredictable ways."
Mina's words are a perfect prologue to her son's documentary - a personal exploration of his parents' marriage, which lasted over 50 years in the Port Washington, N.Y., address of the title. Doug, a filmmaker who also shoots weddings to finance his documentaries, finds himself drawn to uncover their life together after his mother's unexpected death, and his father's abrupt announcement to remarry only three months later.
Mike Block, Doug's 83-year-old father, delivers the news that he has reconnected with an old secretary, nicknamed Kitty, whom he had known 35 years before. The news is understandably shocking to Doug and his two sisters who also learn that Mike is selling the family home at 51 Birch Street and moving with his new bride to that Jewish Mecca of the south, Florida. Though never close to his father, Doug begins filming their encounters before his departure as a way to reconnect on a simpler level.
It's during his father's move that a hoard of Mina's personal writings are discovered - decades of notebooks, typed diary entries, letters and poetry written over a 30-year period. Manuscripts that reveal a woman consumed by a need to know herself through years of psychoanalysis and a desire to seek the most from her suburbanite life. In short, a woman completely unknown to Doug and his sisters.
Block's film is a touching family portrait and an honest attempt to understand his late mother through a marriage that seemed unfit from the start. Inevitably, it comes with a bittersweet ending. But in searching for the secrets to his mother's past, the filmmaker discovers a father he never knew. The revelations made from Mina's written words seem to curb her husband's reticent behavior, allowing him to open up to his son for the first time. Fittingly, however, the final words of "51 Birch Street" belong to Mina, and they are the film's most poignant.
Like a family scrapbook, Block's documentary is assembled from several disjointed pieces of the past and often has the amateur-like feel of a shaky home movie. This unevenness, coupled with Block's narration, offer a homemade atmosphere balanced with occasional off-hand remarks that speak volumes. As when his father admits, "What we learn, we learn a lot too late." They are words that echo throughout the film.
These unexpected moments of lucidity are not presented by narration or talking heads, but by family members in real life circumstances - serving as reminders of the way life lessons are often taught. In this way, the film connects on a much more intimate level. While Block's father is never eloquent and his family is far from perfect, they do show themselves to be as beautifully flawed and as instantly familiar as our own. Bringing us back to Mina's assertion that things are never so direct as they seem, that what we take for granted has a way of being entirely unpredictable.
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