BackgroundOr anyone who has been close to an alcoholic, or someone with mental health problems or, as here, both, at the same time, these are difficult hours. Director Mirid Karten spends a lot of time holding the camera and also channels the open wound here that is her relationship with her mother Nuala, who has bipolar disorder and alcoholism. Nuala often goes missing on the bing, and when the film opens we hear someone dispassionately telling someone on the phone how she has just spotted her mother on a Belfast street, fully staffed, but recognizable by the glamorous high-quality shoes she was wearing.
You would struggle to understand that this is the same woman we see in news footage from years earlier: Soignée, compiled and described as a social worker who wrote a guidance document for the police on how to deal with victims of domestic violence. Nuala of the present when, when she's sober, is still still articulate, empathic and insightful – she just can't stop herself from swiping at red wine, an addiction that similarly affects one of her brothers; Another brother, who insists he is sober, has an unspecified mental disorder that causes him to rage. Families, huh?
Nuala gave Mirida a video camera when she was a teenager, and, a natural archivist as well as an instinctive filmmaker, she seemed to have a handle on everything. It includes shots of children in her class, around nine or 10 years old at the time, and acting out little dramas of drunken adults paddling with their spouses. Later we see footage of “Mirid” and another girl (her sister?) performing psychodrama, cured of the antics of Nuala and other family members. It all escalates until we get an extraordinary spell in which Nuala effectively plays herself off camera, lying like a corpse on the road at night, gorgeous and funny in her bunny jacket. Later, countless lip syncs on the Nuala Talking recording, a device reminiscent of Clio Barnard “Arbor” which, like this, offers a searing examination of generational abuse and guilt.
If it has a flaw, it could do a little more in the storytelling journey, the teleological form that drives the story forward. Still, at least it offers some sense of closure, sealed in a powerful editing set for a propulsive folk performance.
