Finding Forgiveness in Gayle Kirschenbaum’s New Documentary ‘Look at Us Now, Mother!’
Gayle Kirschenbaum is the documentarian behind My Nose, a short film about her mother’s demands that she get a nose job, and A Dog’s Life: A Dogamentary, about her dog Chelsea, her own romantic life, the aftermath of 9/11, and unconditional love. (“Sex and the City Meets Best in Show,” Kirschenbaum called it.) Her newest film, Look at Us Now, Mother!, is a tragicomedy about her troubled relationship with her mom. It opens today in New York City and Los Angeles, and then has screenings in other cities and film festivals.
This is not always an easy film to watch. Gayle’s mother, Mildred Abramowitz Kirschenbaum, now 92, comes off as a figure out of a Philip Roth novel: larger-than-life, selfish, cruel, passive-aggressive, and aggressive-aggressive, a virago of venom. She threatens, on camera, to break her daughter’s camera; tells Gayle, now 60, that she looks “like the Indian on the Buffalo nickel”; says that the reason she wasn’t nice to Gayle when Gayle was 2 was because “she was a bitchy little girl.”