The Norwegian director Gunnar Hall Jensen had been a wild youth, damaged by his mentally troubled mother and indifferent, absent father. So when his own son Jonathan was born in 2002, he felt the mix of trepidation and hope for redemption experienced by many rookie dads. “This new person was my responsibility,” Hall Jensen says at the start of Portrait of a Confused Father, a documentary drawing on the countless hours of footage he took of his child over the next two decades. “We would be connected until the day I die.” We are told from the outset, however, that their relationship ended tragically early. “Now the connection is gone,” Hall Jensen’s narration continues. “He is no longer here. Jonathan, my beautiful boy, is dead.”
Jonathan passed away in 2023, and Hall Jensen chooses to conceal how this happened until the very end of the film. We are led to guess that it was misadventure on the young man’s part, something a better father might have been able to prevent: as Jensen embarks on a chronological, critical analysis of how he reacted to Jonathan’s developing character, every scene bears a bleak portent. Jensen reaches back into the past, to be with his son again and try to discover where they went wrong.
