Children spend a great deal of time watching their parents, but it often takes a lifetime to really see them. The new documentary “The Gas Station Attendant” (in theaters) is Karla Murthy’s loving, sometimes regretful effort to actually look at her father, H.N. Shantha Murthy. He left his village in India as a child, eventually settling in the United States and raising a family. In many ways, his story is like that of other immigrants. But for his daughter, it holds the keys to her own identity and to bigger questions about what it means to make a life in a place like America.
There are plenty of documentaries by children about their parents — especially those that chronicle complicated feelings. Some have been formally inventive, like Chantal Akerman’s “News From Home” (1976) and “No Home Movie” (2016) and Sarah Polley’s “Stories We Tell” (2013). For “The Gas Station Attendant,” Murthy approaches the story more conventionally but thinks like a memoirist, using her own experiences as a way to explore her father’s. The title comes from the part-time job he takes to make ends meet when one of his business ventures fails to be as successful as he’d hoped — an occurrence, we soon learn, that was a running theme in his life. When she was a teenager, this led to a sense of unsettledness and frustration. Who was she, really? Who was he?
Murthy’s story as a child of immigrants is not particularly unique. But her film is engrossing because of the rich tapestry of sources she draws on. Home video from her childhood, archival video of historical moments, recorded phone conversations with her father, family photographs, casual video shot on road trips and her own narration all combine to give the feeling that you’re traversing her memory palace. The almost painfully personal story of her conflicted relationship with her father’s peripatetic job trajectory, his constant need for change, comes alive through these images.
“The Gas Station Attendant” derives most of its power from its subjectivity, letting us see Murthy’s father’s story through her eyes. Her perspective on her father has evolved as she’s gotten older. Even the way she understands the photos and videos she shows us has changed, and her reflection acts on the viewer. We, too, might tell ourselves stories about our own parents, our own histories, to make sense of who we are. But if we dare to take a closer look at those stories, are we ready for what might change in us?
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