Film director Mirid Curtain observed a woman slumped on a sidewalk bench in broad daylight on a busy Belfast shopping street, her head covered by a gray hoodie and a bottle of red wine clutched in her right hand. Pedestrians walk past, either ignoring the crouching figure or giving it a momentary look of concern before continuing with their daily routines. Karten points the camera at her, staring in recognition. For the woman is her mother, Nuala, recognizable to her daughter only by the high-heeled boots on her unsteady feet. They don’t approach you, they don’t greet you loudly, and they don’t return your gaze. Afterwards, before leaving, Curtain admitted that he felt guilty for photographing his mother as if she were a stranger. But as her raw, searing documentary A Want in Her ultimately reveals, theirs is one defined by safe and dangerous distances. Absence sometimes keeps the heart intact, even if it doesn’t make it even more attached.
Expanding on the intensely personal content already explored in Curtain’s short film A Want in Her, this substantial debut feature considers the process and outcome of sharing fragile domestic trauma with an audience. This reveals the artistic background of this film director. of a stranger. But ultimately, the film cedes space to direct anger, shame, and remorse on all sides of a family struggling with alcoholism and mental illness, and who, if in free fall, is responsible for saving lives. This paper presents a complex consideration of whether there is. Emotionally taxing, but tempered by passages of cathartic beauty, grace, and even humor, this IDFA contest entry deserves delicate handling by a discerning professional distributor, but first It takes a long time to run a festival.
The timeline here is frayed and unsettled, meandering from past to present through Kalten’s surprising adolescent perceptual experiments with his own video camera. Meanwhile, subsequent years are sometimes blurred by the tiresome cyclical repetition of addiction itself. When the present Curtains responds to a call from the police, they are informed that Nuala was last seen missing at a bar, but it is clear that this is a story that is already familiar to her. . In fact, much of the film unfolds in the ineffectual voicemails and somber phone conversations that are exchanged over the course of time. Nuala’s alcoholism not only hinders her life, but also the lives of her family, who have no way of helping.
“It’s in the genes, it’s an allergy,” said Danny, the blank-eyed uncle in the curtain painting (himself a veteran of various psychiatric hospitals), who said his family is dealing with grief and personal issues. Explain why it is disproportionately characterized by catastrophe. He takes refuge in a dilapidated mobile home buried in the family garden that his older brother Kevin inherited when his mother died 20 years ago. Whether inheritance is a blessing or a curse is open to question, but the imbalance further corrodes relationships within the family tree that are already flawed at the core. Kevin is unmarried and has a relatively straight-and-narrow personality, but he resents the weight of his obligations to Danny and Nuala. He becomes a reluctant and sometimes flatly uncooperative ally to Curtain, who arrives with the faint hope that she can permanently rehabilitate her mother.
As Hellraiser’s aura built up around her, she was finally retrieved in a parked car, quiet and withdrawn, barely able to maintain reason, muttering cryptically, “It’s all under the sand.” It was a shock to meet Nuala. Eventually, even the camera has a hard time looking into her eyes, averting its gaze to an overly cheery yellow raincoat as mother and daughter prepare to go their separate ways. The shock was compounded when I saw archival footage of Nuala, a bright, purposeful young woman being interviewed as a social worker on a local newscast. As manager of a women’s center in County Donegal, she sought to protect victims of abuse and addiction, no different from her future self. This irony is too sharp and painful for “A Want in Her” to linger.
Not that the past was much happier. Young Curtain’s haunting and inadvertently prescient home videos show her and her friends parodying the drinking and dysfunctional behavior of their elders. Another amazing time capsule records a traumatically ugly argument between a teenager and her mother, who moves from the living room to the front garden, as brutal verbal attacks give way to physical blows. Masu.
Whether out of denial or the fog of addiction, Nuala more happily recalls being a mother, even in the shadow of a young widow. Her daughter is completely reluctant to let such delusions go unchecked. The two sincerely declare over and over again the terms of their unconditional love for each other. “There is nothing you can do to make me turn my back on you,” Nuala insists, knowing that she has risked rejection. But it also sometimes involves confrontational honesty. In one devastating scene, Curtain bluntly tells his mother that he cannot accept mental illness as an excuse for her neglect.
Straightforward and unadorned, the work is not entirely authentic, as the curtains seek out surreal details and distortions in an ordinary domestic space stained with trauma. In one shot, the camera viciously tracks the dirty mesh curtain that hides the pain from the outside. Cobwebbed pockets of mold and damp plaster are examined in extreme and alienating detail, symptoms of a home defined by neglect.
Elsewhere, she and her mother collaborate on a video art project, working together to recreate scenes of Nuala’s rogue wanderings in order to understand where she has been and experience abandonment together. I’m doing it. As reflected in the unusually cold and unsentimental interpretation of the ending scene of the Irish folk ballad “The Wild Rover,” the refrain, “Never again will I play a wild rover,” is a sure sign. It doesn’t give away, but “A Want in Her” doesn’t say anything. Something that depicts the arc of salvation or redemption, or the hometown where the heart is. The eternal bond between mother and daughter is both a comfort and a terrible shared burden.
