How much private pain, if any, should we put into the public domain? You might say I stumbled on Myrid Carten's documentary "A Want in Her" almost my accident because a long time ago I knew her father Paul and have been aware of events in his life since, (his marriage, a stroke at a fairly early age), through a mutual friend but I didn't know his wife, Nuala, his daughter or anything of their lives.
Carten's film is fundamentally a study of her mother, an alcoholic who became a street drinker, (she and Paul separated some time ago), and it consists mainly of conversations between Myrid and her mother, telephone calls and 'home movies' courtesy of footage shot by a teenage Myrid on the camcorder her parents got her and it seems Myrid has been recording life and the world around her ever since.
Of course, there are other people in the film, too chiefly her two uncles, (her father Paul is never seen nor heard), and Carten's camera is like a scalpel taken to a festering wound. The Gallaghers, (Nuala's maiden name before her marriage), are shown as definitely dysfunctional but perhaps as we watch them squabble and bare their souls we could ask ourselves aren't all families a bit dysfunctional?
As a piece of film-making it certainly shows Carten's skill but I also found it deeply intrusive. Carten herself has defended her film by saying it's cathartic and helps people in a similar situation, (showing they are not alone? But then do people in that kind of situation really believe they are alone?), but personally I found much of what Carten shows us as simply too private, too painful and something that perhaps should have been worked out within the family circle and far from the camera's gaze and in the end I think it told me more about the film-maker than the subject, (both her uncles tell her to switch the camera off on separate occasions). It ends on a positive note; Nuala is now sober but is she happy? We can only guess.
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