Reel Rundown: Abuse is all ‘Relative’ in documentary film

Documentary filmmaker Tracey Arcabasso Smith’s film “Relative” carries a double meaning in its title. In one sense, it refers to the main subject of her film, which is her family.

In another sense, though, her use of the term “relative” follows the dictionary definition of “existing or having its specific nature only by relation to something else.”

Describing something as good, bad or indifferent, for example is a relative exercise. What’s good to you, in other words, might not mean anything to me. And vice versa.

In Arcabasso Smith’s film the something being examined is sexual abuse. And what she discovers is that her Italian-American family’s views of such abuse, which had been perpetrated on the women by the men in their lives, differs from generation to generation.

She begins by revealing that she herself had been abused – assaulted, actually – repeatedly during her childhood. And it says something about the attitudes in her family, and how those attitudes affected her, that she didn’t even begin looking into the issue until she was in her 30s.

When she does ask the other women in her family about their experiences, at first they dissemble before grudgingly admitting that much the same had happened to each of them. What’s more, their abusers had been the very men they had looked to for love and support – brothers, cousins and at least one grandfather.

But then the excuse-making begins. Times back then, the women insist, were different. No matter how bad groping might be, one woman says, “at least it wasn’t rape.”

Arcabasso Smith’s own abuse began even before she’d entered adolescence. But when she told her priest about what had happened, how the assault had progressed from kissing to hands being pushed into her pants, his counsel was typical of the era: Do nothing.

Smith augments her film, which at 70 minutes is all too brief, with snippets from home movies that show what appears to be jovial family gatherings, even if the men looks as if they’re treating the woman more as playthings than equal partners.

Yet perhaps the saddest sequence involves Smith’s grandmother who admits that her husband would sometimes beat her. But, she adds, she didn’t speak up because her greatest desire was to maintain family unity.

“I didn’t let it affect me,” she says. “I had to be strong.”

And maybe she was right to do so, relatively speaking.