Review
The Quiet Girl review – deeply moving tale of
rural Ireland already feels like a classic
A silent child is sent away to live with foster
parents on a farm in this gem of a film from first-time feature director Colm
Bairéad
Peter
Bradshaw
@PeterBradshaw1
Wed 11 May
2022 11.00 BST
https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/may/11/the-quiet-girl-review-beauty-and-pain-in-rural-ireland
This
beautiful and compassionate film from first-time feature director Colm Bairéad,
based on the novella Foster by Claire Keegan, is a child’s-eye look at our
fallen world; already it feels to me like a classic. There’s a lovely scene in
which the “quiet girl” of the title, 10-year-old Cáit (played by newcomer
Catherine Clinch), is reading Heidi before bedtime, and this movie, for all its
darkness and suppressed pain, has the solidity, clarity and storytelling gusto
of that old-fashioned Alpine children’s tale – about the little girl sent away
to live in a beautiful place with her grandfather.
The setting
is the early 80s, in a part of County Waterford where Irish is mostly spoken
(subtitled in English). Cáit is a withdrawn little kid, one of many siblings,
always wandering off on her own over the farmland: the opening shot of her is a
deception of sorts, hinting at a chilling destiny. Cáit is often wide-eyed,
silent and watchful, to the irritation of her exhausted and now once-again
heavily pregnant mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) and her thuggish, abusive and
hungover dad (Michael Patric). Naturally without telling Cáit or being mindful
of her feelings in any way, her parents decide they need a break from looking
after her and pack the girl off for the summer to her mother’s cousin Eibhlín
(Carrie Crowley) and her taciturn farmer husband Seán (Andrew Bennett), whose
vastly more prosperous and better-run smallholding infuriates Cáit’s sullen dad
when he drives up in his car to drop her off. He can hardly summon the good
manners to make conversation before getting back in his car to drive back home
and in his boorish haste, he has a lapse of memory which is to have serious
consequences for Cáit’s new life.
Crowley and
Bennett give heart-wrenchingly excellent performances as the unhappy, childless
couple who have taken Cáit in: particularly Crowley as Eibhlín, a well-bred,
intelligent, elegant woman who is brightly engaged with the child as no one has
ever been in her life. But Cáit is quick to understand that they have a
“secret”, which her sneering father already seems to know about.
As this
long, hot summer progresses with the endlessness of childhood, Kate
McCullough’s superb cinematography and Emma Lowney’s production design create a
magically beautiful new world for Cáit to feel at once threatened and exalted
by: almost every shot is a vividly composed, painterly gem. Above all, there is
a mysterious artificial rainwater pond in surrounding woodland which Eibhlín
says has supernatural powers. A vinegary tang of black comedy and cynicism is
provided by neighbour Úna (a terrific performance from Joan Sheehy) who looks
after Cáit one afternoon and brutally tells the girl all about what her foster parents
aren’t telling her – and Bairéad cleverly allows you to suspect that Eibhlín
wanted Úna to shoulder the awful burden of revealing this. Cáit’s quietness is
perhaps the quietness of an abuse victim, or perhaps the quietness of a clever
person who knows that not talking is the way to survive. As Seán tells her:
“Many’s the person missed the opportunity to say nothing.” And when Cáit
returns home, it is her failure to obey this golden rule, and blurting out the
phrase “nothing happened”, which is to cause a new stab of pain.
In another
kind of movie, a lazier kind, all this stillness and rural beauty, seen by an
enigmatically silent child who is accustomed to vanishing invisibly into the
landscape, would be the ominous foretaste of something horrible or violent to
come just before the final credits. But The Quiet Girl is doing something
gentler than this, as well as realer and truer. It is a jewel.
The Quiet Girl is released on 13 May in
cinemas and on Curzon Home Cinema.
This article was amended on 11 May 2022 to
correct the primary location of the film’s story, which is County Waterford.
No comments:
Post a Comment