The term “cinematic sleight-of-hand” is something of a misnomer. All cinema is a fake; a collection of still images that pretends to move. But something in Thomas Burstyn’s very personal documentary seems to call out for the term.
It’s not that the filmmaker is being willfully duplicitous; just that as Some Kind of Love progresses, it wanders down unexpected, sometimes unexplained corridors. The results may occasionally exasperate, but they are also deeply moving.
Burstyn’s subject is that skeleton-laden corridor of closets, his own family. Born in Montreal in 1954, he has a brother, 12 years older, to whom he hasn’t spoken in years. His parents, Polish refugees from the Second World War, exist for him in that fractured-rear-view-mirror view of children who can’t reconcile memories with fading photographs.