A strange but reassuring ouroboros effect is present in Ross Killeen’s documentary about dementia. One of the things that the ailing Helena can remember is her son’s childhood urge to embrace creative thinking. Now an adult and a street artist under the name Asbestos, art is the means by which he attempts to understand her identity and confront her disintegration. It is a work that surrounds her, extends into the streets of Dublin and colours the fabric of this luminous, sensitive film.
Helena can’t remember what day of the week it is, or what month it is. Her husband tries to reawaken her synapses by consulting her about crossword puzzles. The film is awash in mnemonic devices: archive footage of family times and old holidays, and street scenes in which Helena’s walking figure has been written over. But if all this demonstrates the fallibility of memory, it doesn’t stop Asbestos from trying to make sense of the inner world. His surrealist murals reinforce his preoccupation with identity, and he comes up with a striking move to address his personal grief: an exhibition of chalk-on-board drawings of his family that he invites the audience to erase or draw over.
Helena—a worrier before dementia—seems, ironically, happier when she lives purely in the present. She smiles every time she sees a photo of her son. And as Asbestos adds them to his project, an unexpected calm descends on the documentary, his mother’s tautological narration of times gone by working like a lullaby. The moment of letting go is elegiac rather than traumatic; the drawings hang around the city, erased by the incoming sea, stained into oblivion by the rain, and lovingly annotated.
Who knows if art can really stop the tidal wave of personal destruction – but here at least for once it seems to work.