THE GAS STATION ATTENDANT – Review by Sarah Ward
“It all looked so much smaller than what I remembered.” So observes Karla Murthy, The Gas Station Attendant’s director, writer and producer. So we’ve all said — or thought, at least — in our own trips to the past. In the lovingly crafted, personal essay-style documentary that pays tribute to her father, Murthy succinctly and thoughtfully opines on the size that places and spaces hold in our hearts and minds while revisiting the last childhood home that she lived in with her late mother, who died when she was eight. The filmmaker-slash-narrator’s words aren’t just universal to everyone, however, but to the ongoing experience of existing and aging and reflecting. Old kitchens spied through exterior windows aren’t the only thing that will always feel bigger to those who once cooked, ate, shared or laughed within them; every detail and moment, every choice and twist of fate, too, is larger to inhabit and to mentally, emotionally return to than to peer at from the outside.
This difference in the magnitude felt when something has unshakeable personal significance, rather than when viewed from a more-detached vantage, is part of the lifeblood of The Gas Station Attendant. Among the many spots that the idea dwells throughout the film, it’s there in a mention of a 1992 New York Times article titled ‘An Ethnic Road to Riches: The Immigrant Job Specialty’, for instance, about the proliferation of South Asian-run gas station in the Big Apple area. Murthy singles out a line, “their occupational choices are based on factors like skills and values learned in the old country”. While it is immediately, indisputably evident that those words can never capture the entire sum of forces and decisions that lead anyone to any juncture in their life, including Indian immigrants in the US to gas stations, Murthy’s surrounding movie and its portrait-slash-meditation approach to telling her dad HN Shantha Murthy’s story demonstrates that fact over and over.
The younger Murthy doesn’t recount her father’s birth-to-death journey in a strictly linear fashion; The Gas Station Attendant is far more emotionally driven, and more intimate and subjective in its structure and tone. Accordingly, her documentary flits around, jumping between years — leaping between Texas, New York and Arkansas in America, plus India, her mother’s homeland of The Philippines and family vacations elsewhere, too, and through generations from her father’s earliest years to her children’s youth — like sifting through a swirl of memories. That’s the exact process both guiding and anchoring the film, after all, and on two levels: Karla recalls her dad and her time with him, aided by home-video footage taped over decades; via late-night phone calls recorded when Shantha had the job that gives the movie its moniker, he similarly reminisces.
As the specifics flow, it’s quickly clear that relaying the events of Shantha’s existence in order would’ve still proven engaging and moving. His tale spans poverty, leaving home at ten, sleeping on the streets and working to survive, then a supreme act of kindness by American tourists, a fresh start in a new country, the two romantic loves of his life, his six children, a plethora of professions along the way from Boeing engineer to travel agent, and oh-so-many hopes and plans (and revisions and reworkings of those hopes and plans). That said, Murthy again shows she knows that the weight of that story shifts depending on whether it’s experienced from the inside or with distance. Indeed, she’s learning that truth herself as she strives to better understand Shantha, and to answer a range of whys and hows that are so pivotal to that task — and, along the way, to re-evaluate everything she believed was a given in the way that kids do with their parents unless they actively challenge those engrained thought patterns.
Eschewing the straightforward for the intuitive and evocative, then, is critical to why and how The Gas Station Attendant resonates with viewers, and strongly. (Skewing instinctual also perfectly matches the personal sheen inherent in the movie’s imagery, as lensed by Murthy and This Is Not a Drill’s Andy Sarjahani, even when lingering shots stare at neon-lit gas stations in the inky dark of night.) Only a hard-hearted audience member will finish the film uninspired to internally follow in Karla’s footsteps, reassessing what they think they know about their own father and/or mother. Only the most closed-off of cinemagoers will fail to realise that what they might’ve classed as mere minutiae in a loved one’s tale can actually mean everything.
Offering another insightful interrogation of the American dream as Murthy’s debut feature The Place That Makes Us, about Youngstown, Ohio, equally did, the entirety of this perceptive movie is a catalyst. Still, particularly influential is a point made late in the piece, when Karla stresses the importance of preserving family histories with all their joys and woes and everything in-between. Also emphasised: how essential that act is, passing down the past from parents to children again and again, for continuity, resilience, and as a framework to filter through all that’s yet to come. Whether its filmmaker is laying bare abandoned concert-pianist aspirations or revelling at festive parties, or her father is remembering 18-hour workdays or greeting friends at a New Orleans gift and jewellery trade fair, The Gas Station Attendant is that family-history process as well as a testament to it, in fact, as an intensely honest, astute and affecting film.
