On a busy shopping street in Belfast, in broad daylight, director Mairead Cartin noticed a woman reclining on a sidewalk bench, her head hidden by a gray hood, her right hand clutching a bottle of red wine. Pedestrians walk by, either ignoring the hunched figure or giving her a fleeting look of concern before continuing on with their day. Carten keeps her camera on her, in a stunned confession—because the woman is her mother, Nuala, recognizable to her daughter only by the high-heeled shoes on her unsteady feet. No approach was made, no greeting was shouted, no glance was returned. Later, Carten admitted feeling guilty for portraying her mother as if she were a stranger, before walking away. But as her raw and searing documentary “A Want in Her” ultimately makes clear, their relationship is defined by safe and unsafe distances. Absence, if it does not make the heart fall in love, sometimes keeps it healthy.
A major debut film that expands on deeply personal material already explored in Carten’s short body of work, “A Want in Her” demonstrates the director’s fine artistic background, as he considers the process and reward of sharing vulnerable domestic trauma with an audience of outsiders. But ultimately leaving room for direct anger, shame, and remorse on all sides in a family plagued by alcoholism and mental illness, the film offers a complex examination of who, if anyone, is responsible for saving a life in free fall. Emotionally exhausting yet comforting through passages of beauty, grace and even humour, this IDFA competition entry deserves careful treatment from discerning specialty distributors, even though the long festival goes first.
The timeline here is frayed and turbulent, meandering from past to present through Carten’s hyper-perceptive teenage experiments with the video camera. Meanwhile, the subsequent chronology is sometimes blurred by the tiring cyclical repetition of the addiction itself. When Carten, in the present, receives a call from the police – informing her that Nuala has disappeared, having last been seen in a bar – it is clear that this is a story she is already familiar with. In fact, much of the film plays out in helpless voicemails and sad phone conversations that have gone before: Nuala’s alcoholism disrupts not only her life, but the lives of family members who can’t find ways to help.
“It’s in the genes, it’s a sensitivity,” Carten’s hollow-eyed uncle Danny—himself a veteran of several psychiatric hospitals—explains why their family is disproportionately marked by grief and personal devastation. He lives in a dilapidated mobile home buried in the garden of the family home, inherited only by his brother Kevin when their mother died twenty years ago. Whether the inheritance was a blessing or a curse is open to question, although the imbalance has further rotted relationships in a family tree that was already damaged to the root. Kevin is unmarried, upstanding, and relatively straight-laced, but embittered by the weight of commitment to Danny and Nuala; He is a reluctant and sometimes downright uncooperative ally of Carten when she arrives with the faint hope of rehabilitating her mother for good.
With the aura of hell building around her, it was a surprise to encounter a finally recovered Nuala, meekly retreating and barely holding herself together in a parked car, mysteriously muttering “It’s all under the sand.” Eventually, even the camera has difficulty looking into her eyes, shifting its gaze to her cheerful yellow raincoat, as mother and daughter try to negotiate another way forward. The shock is compounded by archival footage of young Nuala, intelligent and purposeful, being interviewed as a social worker on a local news broadcast. As director of a women’s center in Donegal, she sought to protect victims of abuse and addiction no differently than her future self; The irony is too sharp and painful for the “need” to sustain it.
Not that the past was a much happier place, as the poignant and unintentionally insightful home videos captured by young Carten show her and her friends poking fun at the drinking and dysfunctional antics of their elders. Another stunning time capsule captures an ugly argument between teenage Carten and her mother, as they travel from the living room to the front yard, as brutal verbal attacks give way to physical blows.
Whether through denial or the fog of addiction, Nuala remembers motherhood with greater joy, even in the shadow of young widowhood. Her daughter is not quite willing to let such illusions persist. The two repeatedly and sincerely declare the terms of their unconditional love for each other: “There is nothing you could do that would make me turn my back on you,” Nuala says adamantly, knowing she has done too much to risk rejection. But with that sometimes comes confrontational honesty. In one devastating scene, Carten bluntly tells her mother that she does not accept mental illness as an excuse for maternal neglect.
Although this material is frank and unadorned, “A Want in Her” is not an exercise in reality, as Carten searches for surreal details and distortions in ordinary domestic spaces tainted by trauma. In one shot, the camera eerily tracks a set of dirty net curtains that hide the pain from the outside; Pockets of cobweb mold and plaster dampness are examined in intense and repulsive detail, specific household symptoms of neglect.
Elsewhere, she and her mother collaborate on video art projects, replaying scenes of Nuala’s rogue wanderings in a joint effort to understand where she has been, to experience her abandonment together. As the stark and unusually unsentimental interpretation of the Irish folk song “The Wild Rover” echoes in its closing scenes – without giving any certainty to the line “I won’t play the wild rover anymore” – “A Want in Her” offers no pat The arc of redemption or salvation or home is where the heart is. That mother and daughter are forever bound to each other is both their common comfort and their terrible burden.