In her documentary Resynator, Alison Tavel is grasping for answers and clarity. She is seeking resolutions and clues that will help her build a true, holistic image of her father, Don, who passed away only a few months after she was born. As a child, all she had to hold on to as memories of her father were all but stories of his legendary genius, a man who invented the synthesizer in the seventies. Only much later did she come to learn it was another revolutionary prototype called the resonator that he had brought to life. If it was so radical, why is it that she is the only one who has it? The device garnered advanced publicity and a lump of orders, but Don eventually halted its large-scale production.
The box containing the resonator holds mystery, she remarks at one point. It is the key to this elusiveness Alison yearns to unlock, comprehend, and understand. Her relationship with the resonator becomes premised on a journey of self-discovery as she embarks on a search for who her father truly was. She pines to forage for his essence buried beneath all the embellished stories about him that were constructed by her mother and loved ones. A person is so much bigger, messier, and way more flawed than glorified accounts imagined as a way of consolation.
The resonator becomes her guide to discovering the complex, raw identity of Don. Through an assemblage of archival footage and interviews with her family, associates, and Don’s collaborators, the director invokes a quest where a daughter attempts to conceive and build a relationship with her father that she never got to make. Don surely was an innovator who dabbled in nearly everything and sought all his life to fuse music and technology together. Everyone seemed to know him. But there are several gaping holes embedded in these narratives spun around him. Alison turns her gaze directly on those.
As she digs deeper, she is confronted with changing, unsettling perceptions of her father; the myths around him slowly unravel to reveal a man teeming with insecurities, hurt, and grief, who was also capable of terrible unpleasantness. There is a clutch of jolting, unnerving realizations and epiphanies that evoke the portrait of a man wracked with depression and a gamut of unresolved psychological issues stemming from his own childhood. Don was haunted by a profound fear of failure that had its roots in the constricted ways he thought his family looked at him. The love he found lacking morphed into bitterness and abandonment issues that served to isolate him further from people who genuinely cared for him.
Nor was he the ideal husband; he would often lash out and be abusive to her mother and shut her out. At one point, he threatened her mother that he’d throw her out of the house. Alison’s mother saw Don as an immensely caring and kind man, all of which was quickly demolished soon after her marriage with him. The relationship turned sour and wretched, and ultimately, her mother called it quits.
There’s incredible frankness and bravery with which Alison takes us on this deeply personal journey. Despite the existence of several iterations of such narratives, the director’s neat and confident grip ensures the viewer chooses to stay with her. In a few moments, Resynator suffers from situations that are too consciously orchestrated and the abrupt swiftness of a dramatic resolution. A major glitch gets miraculously repaired. This is where the film loses its footing. The crispness of the curation also tends to border on the manufactured, the cutting a tad too designed and suspiciously tailored for aptness.
Where is the inherent unwieldiness and the muddle of doubts? The film’s form and techniques, therefore, awkwardly clash with the philosophy it espouses, and the subsequent jarring effect is often too glaring to overlook. There are also diligently rendered animated bits peppered throughout, but which come off as slovenly conceived and almost puerile. As a pursuit of complexity, filmmaking is determinedly simplistic, sticking close to the surface. Nevertheless, the film shines with purity and sincerity that rescues it from lapsing into the formulaic, dry beats of a predictable memory piece.
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