[In the following review, Moore praises Egoyan's exploration of the nature of family in Family Viewing, but finds fault with his use of prostitution to suggest alienation.]

All is not well in the heart of that most sacred bastion of society—the family. If you believe what you read you will know that this most fundamental institution is under attack from a multitude of directions. Promiscuous single parents, campaigning homosexuals, morally-irresponsible television programmes and, of course, feminists who claim that the family is the site of woman's oppression par excellence, are all seen to threaten normal family life. You might wonder how something as supposedly natural and institutionalised can feel itself to be so fragile and flimsy.

This week's films may in part provide the answer. For although they are “about” families, they all point to the emptiness of traditional family life.

Family Viewing is an extraordinary film from a Canadian director, the wonderfully-named Atom Egoyan. As far as video technology is concerned it would appear that the family that plays together is erased together. At the centre of this blackest of comedies are father and son, Stan and Van. Stan is a semi-catatonic video salesman who can only be turned on when the camera is switched on or by second-hand telephone sex. Sandra, his hapless mistress, is instead preoccupied with 17-year-old Van who is increasingly worried about “not feeling connected.”

As his father erases home movies of Van's mother who has “run away” with home-made remote control porn, Van visits his Armenian grandmother who has been put into a seedy nursing home, in an effort to retrieve his past.

Egoyan cleverly mixes different kinds of film—the authentic looking jumpy home-movies providing another texture to the stilted apartment scenes which he shoots on video. Using the inane laughter of sit-coms on the sound-track, he flattens out these traces of family life so that we are always reminded that they are in Godard's famous words “just an image.” With ridiculous anti-naturalistic dialogue the film is in turn hilarious and desperately sad.

In the midst of all this alienation Van conspires to construct another kind of family with his grandmother and Aline, the young women who works for the telephone sex service patronised by his father. Pursued by the obsessive Stan, they become once more the objects of surveillance. Throughout the film we are aware of the presence of video cameras—in shops, lifts, hospitals and hotels—and of the way that this everyday surveillance coerces us all into behaving “properly” wherever we are.

Family Viewing succeeds in posing all sorts of questions about memory—about a culture that records everything but remembers nothing, in a brilliantly haunting way. But why, oh why, do all these arty directors from Wenders to Godard, and now Egoyan, have to resort to that tired old metaphor of prostitution whenever they want to conjure up a bit of alienation? Why couldn't Aline have worked in a shop instead of selling sex to pay her mother's nursing-home bills? My own suspicion is that while parading as some kind of critique, prostitution is vaguely titillating to male directors and audiences. All those screen whores service the fantasies of thousands of the right-on men who sit there believing that, come the revolution, they could take them away from all this.

What is interesting about Family Viewing is that the nuclear family looks so perverse and sinister by comparison with Van's self-created family who actually provide love and care.

Yet we all know where “pretend family relationships” can lead to, don't we? For it is homosexuality that is perceived to undermine the very basis of familial life. As usual, no amount of theorising can express the stupidity of this idea as eloquently as the words of an “ordinary person.” In the American documentary about gay rights, Rights and Reactions, an elderly gay woman says: “When people say I'm a threat to the family—I think of pay kids, my grandchildren, my son-in-law.” In the background protestors who believe that “we should do away with gays if possible” hold banners that say it all: “Tradition, Family, Property.”

Which is why a short New Zealand film, A Death in the Family, should be compulsory viewing. Andy, dying of AIDS, goes back to New Zealand to be looked after by his friends. Unlike the British television dramas Intimate Contact and Sweet as You Are, which presented AIDS as essentially a crisis for the heterosexual family, A Death in the Family puts Andy's dying and its effect on his gay friends at the core of the film. When his conservative family, who have never accepted his gayness, come to visit, it is once again the real family that appears emotionally impoverished.

The film never glosses over the realities of an appalling loss. Andy says himself, “This is one bitch of a death.” I, for one, don't subscribe to the idea that learning to die is somehow good for you. When it comes to AIDS, tears are not enough. Many people dying of AIDS will not get a place in a hospice, let alone have a network of friends to care for them. A Death in the Family is an elegant and quietly intense film that should be shown on television immediately.

It seems that those who portray the family as under siege from pernicious outside influences have got it (deliberately?) wrong. What is tearing the family apart is the eruption of tensions that have always existed within the family. What these films suggest, in quite different ways, is not that we should all go off and live in communes, but that it is possible even in the midst of the fallout from the nuclear family, to make new kinds of families, new kinds of communities.

In the light of Cleveland and the Clause, “pretend family relationships” have never seemed like such a good idea.