January was inundated with visions of my nemesis city, New York. Vanessa Stockley’s sly documentary captures a corner of the city which even now has been lost. It’s a straight-up observational doc, which follows the lives of two women, Ruth and Jessica. Ruth, the onetime opera singer, is 90, whilst Jessica is her daughter. They live in a rent-controlled apartment in the West Village. The apartment is a valuable commodity and the Kuchneresque powers that be want them out, but that’s not the story here. The story is about the relationship between a mother and a daughter, the former close to death now. Two people who have lived boxed up in a small flat together for many years, who bicker and fight and sing and sometimes betray the fact that they love each other more than either can say. - a love which can only be expressed through song. It’s a fully embedded piece which captures every nuance of the relationship: Jessica’s intolerant wit and Ruth’s birdlike all-seeing gaze. In this sense it’s also a tender portrait of age, “second childishness and mere oblivion, Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”. The film is accompanied by several sequences where Jessica, (who is just as New York as Howard in Uncut Gems), patrols her barrio, and in these sequences the combative energy and argot of the city comes alive, a chaotic energy which is mirrored in the ongoing skirmish between mother and daughter in their flat high above the streets.
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