There is no need to be someone recognized in order to be considered important,’’ this phrase which was said by a person at the end of Alison Tavel’s heart touching documentary movie ‘Resynator’. There is an assertion that many of such confessional films made in a family setting revolve around that detail. “Dick Johnson is Dead,” Last Flight Home, even as “Sr.,” Richmond’s broad strokes are basic: Elizabeth Margulies and other younger filmmakers and ‘legacies’ bring eager to work out their relationships with parents complicated or not. There is always some animation, some confessionary, and a few home videos and some of their acquaintances talking, and bingo, SXSW. However, Resynator has only slightly fishy nose but such nose is not less attractive. What is more striking is the level of emotional honesty with which the story’s main plot is developed more than fully to note it among those listed examples.
The story starts and ends with Tavel, a twenty-year old traveling musician whose quiet but charming screen presence comfortably guides us through her family’s life. All her life, she was filled with curiosity about her father Don Tavel who died in a car accident when she was barely ten weeks old. She grew up all the time being told that her father was one of the people who invented a synthesizer, only to later discover that this was not necessarily the case. However, he did design something called the Resynator, which is a reconvention of a synthesizer which takes organic sounds and converts them into electronic sound. He did spend a lot of time and money, energy and advertising toward it (even got the notice of Peter Gabriel once), but the thing was a flop. After searching for it for so long, Ali finds what seems to be this miraculous device in Tavel’s attic. And thus goes the cycle of Tavel trying to understand her father and daughter, as Tavel tries to work out the pieces of the Resynator.
For a music-tech nerd like myself, ‘Resynator’ has many positives; seeing Tavel and her peers interact with the device in its early stages and its marketing is quite exciting for gearheads who have salivated over Minimoogs in the past. While Tavel is fixing the device, we see large numbers of cameos from various artists starting with Gotye to Fred Armisen, which in the end culminates to a nice collage of all these artists trying out and exploring a very different way to create music.
However, “Resynator” gets its most pleasant notes when focusing on Tavel and her task of tuning the prototype and her understanding of the parentage she had. She was always cared for by a step-father, so there never was the drive to actually gain knowledge of the real Don; he wore the mask of an odd character who had an intriguing past with music. Where the conversations with her mother, her grandmother, his former business partner and others leave the matter, “Resynator” shows as a very interesting but only partial portrait of a man tormented by art. All those traits won him the status of a music genius, but he was constantly depressed, had suicidal ideation, came from a family background that supported him, but was never affectionate. Tavel’s process of detective work or peeling back the layers of the onion is very intimate and sensitive which is especially palpable in more than a couple of raw instances when she discovers some letters that her mother had hidden from her who had previously said that she never wanted her to look badly at her father, because they were confessing letters.
Tavel’s intrigue builds up and so does our interest, and she controls our pace through the timing of the secrets being revealed; aside from some awkward animation bits that appear unnecessary (“because Tavel admires Don and paints him as a superman”), the rest is well woven into the narrative and the pace of the rest of the film is similar so it all fits in well.
And for the father Tavel is reconstructing, she poses several self questions such as, What is it that makes her want to find him all over again? Why bother reconstructing this device that never took off in the 1980s? Is resurrecting the Resynator in some way reminiscent of reviving Don?
The documentation might be self-centered and self-serving, but Tavel imparts some heart and charm into the documentary format that makes it personable: an effort to know her father through a large plastic box of wires that neck can bring her closer to her dad. So does the Resynator stand out among its contemporaries, because to me it does not seem very advanced or innovative at all.
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