Ciaran Carty

Sunday Tribune                                                  

July 2000

 

The measure of Ireland’s coming of age as a movie producing country is not what the already established Neil Jordan, Jim Sheridan or Pat O’Connor continue to achieve, but – helped by their breakthrough and the resulting legislation that laid the foundations for a film industry – the emergence of new filmmakers capable of producing a consistent flow of new movies. This year’s Galway Film Fleadh – which opened on Tuesday with Steve Barron’s Rat and closes tonight with Kevin Liddy’s Country – confirms that breakthrough.

 

What’s exciting about this new crop of directors – which includes playwright Conor McPherson (making his directorial debut with Saltwater), Fintan Connolly (Flick) and playwright Peter Sheridan (The Borstal Boy) – is that they ‘ve broken away from the preoccupation with theory and ideology that for so long bedevilled Irish independent film-making. They’re not interested in using movies as part of an argument about the nature of Irish identity: instead they show Irish life as it is – or was- and let the audience make what they like of it. Their movies are movies, not statements or messages.

 

Liddy’s feature debut Country and Connolly’s Flick in some ways say more about Ireland – without actually saying it – than anything you’re likely to read from academics or social commentators. Part of their fascination is that they might almost be about two totally different countries.

 

Liddy, reflecting the obsession of many Irish writers and filmmakers with the 1950’s, tells the story of an abusive father and two sons in a closed rural community. It’s very much the claustrophobic world of Cathal Black’s Korea and John McGahern’s Amongst Women, seen through the eyes of a younger boy (newcomer Dean Pritchard). Everyone keeps to themselves, nursing dark secrets. The catalyst is the return from the city of the boy’s aunt (Lisa Harrow) – his dead mother’s sister – for the funeral of her brother (who, shunned by everyone except the boy as a “Communist” because he fought in the Spanish Civil War, lived out his last days a virtual recluse). The father and the two boys in their different ways are drawn to her femininity, but not enough to change their ways. “You might come here for a few days and think you can fix things,” the father warns her.

 

Liddy subtlety lays bare the wounds of the family – wounds inflicted by the intolerance of those around them and bleeding in the darkness of pubs, the furtive pairings of the dance hall, the bigoted shunning of the travellers. Country is a movie rooted in the physical reality of the landscape – fields of bright yellow barleycorn and against cloudy blue skies, the lighted windows in the cold nights, the haze of evening harvest time – marvelously captured by lighting cameraman Donal Gilligan. You breathe and feel the countryside much as in Claude Berri movies Jean de Florette and Manon des Sources. It’s a wonderfully tactile movie, all in the eye, capturing a world that would no doubt be incomprehensible to the characters in Fintan Connolly’s Flick yet in a sense they came out of it.

 

The significance of the 1950s is that it was an Irish watershed: nothing would ever be the same again. Lisa Harrow takes the young boy in Country to the pictures to see a John Wayne western. If they saw Flick they would think it was an American thriller. Yet Flick brilliantly taps into the self-aware beat of Dublin today, a youth culture of clubbing, drugs and casual sex. David Murray is a Dublin 4 type who lives in a designer apartment pushing hash to friends and contacts. It all begins to fall apart when he gets greedy and annoys some big-time pushers.

 

The dialogue catches the glib ambience of his circle. “What do you do,” asks a German girl he picks up. “What do you think?” he replies. “Something bad?” she says. “Does it bother you?” he asks. “No. Does it bother you?” The nub of the movie is that it does bother Murray, but he’s in so deep he can’t get out. “I’m sorry”, he tells his girlfriend, when she finds out he slept with the German girl. “No,” she says, “you’re not”. This rings true, too. No one in Flick is sorry. This is an amoral Dublin – living for the excitement of the moment – a Dublin unthinkable in the narrow-minded 1950s. Back then there was little for people to look forward to. Now there is too much, too soon.

 

Paradoxically, the longing of Murray in Flick is to escape to the country. In Country, the young people dream of getting away to the city.  Ireland seems always to go to extremes. Whatever the period, people want out of it.

 

Clarence Pictures are to distribute both Flick and Country. Flick releases in August, Country in October.