Whisper it ...a quietly confident film that’s breathtaking
An Cailín Ciúin (12A)
EVERY so often, a film comes along that stops you dead in your tracks, not because of big-bang explosions, jaw-dropping cliffhangers, or dazzling, rapid-fire dialogue. Instead it seduces you with a rare lyricism that slowly reels you in, bewitching you at every turn.
An Cailín Ciúin, or The Quiet Girl in English, is that movie, and it is a marvel, in the true rather than superhero sense of the word. Every word spoken feels carefully considered, yet completely natural.
It is the story of Cáit, the nine-year-old girl of the title with a turbulent home life on a barely viable small farm. She has a plethora of siblings, among whom she quietly disappears, wearing invisibility like a cloak, parsing out her words as if she has been granted a limited supply for life and doesn’t want to use them up too quickly. Her father is a feckless, drunken gambler, her careworn mother struggling to survive on the pittance he shares for food and clothes as she approaches the end of yet another pregnancy.
It is decided that Cáit will spend the summer with her mother’s cousin Eibhlín and her husband Seán, a childless middleaged couple who also manage a farm, in the Rinn Gaeltacht in Co. Waterford. Her father, unreliable as ever, drives off with Cáit’s suitcase, leaving her with only the clothes she is wearing.
Eibhlín bathes the scruffy Cáit and it feels like a baptism, a renewal of life itself. Seán is slower to come around to the presence of a child in the house, but is won over, and every beat in the miraculous blossoming of a love Cáit has never known feels like that of a dormant heart springing back to life.
In one chat, he reassures her that she is not freakish, as she has been told once too often. In words as wise as they are beautiful, he says: ‘You don’t have to say anything, always remember that. Many a person has missed the opportunity to say nothing, and lost much because of it.’
It is advice wasted on a neighbour, Úna, an inquisitive gossip. Eibhlín has told Cáit that there are no secrets in her new home, and she must talk about everything that concerns her – but Úna reveals a devastating secret that redraws the emotional landscape for all involved.
It would be wrong to say any more, but how everyone arrives at a resolution to their private turmoil is a sage lesson – quietness is not only about the minimal use of words, but also about the imprisonment of outward emotions to the detriment of all who keep them locked up. The film is based on Foster, a novella by Claire Keegan adapted and directed by Colm Bairéad and produced by Cleona Ní Chrualaoí, under the married couple’s Inscéal production company. For a first-time feature director, Bairéad puts to great use his background in short films and documentaries, always aware that the slow reveal carries more weight than too much show and tell. Director of photography Kate McCullough, who also shot Normal People, captures rural Ireland in a way seldom seen before; it is no small compliment to say it is reminiscent of Ghislain Cloquet and Geoffrey Unsworth’s work in Roman Polanski’s Tess. Stephen Rennicks contributes a beautifully pared-back score, and production designer Emma Lowney, art director Neill Tracey, and set decorators Dara Hand and Jackson Todd miraculously and vividly bring the early Eighties back to life, right down to the ceramic cake-mixing bowl every mammy had back then.
It is the performances that really catapult An Cailín Ciúin beyond the realm of the ordinary, though. As the foster parents, Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett are the epitome of stoic dignity, but it is Catherine Clinch as Cáit, in a debut performance, who mesmerises.
Her face is a wonder, often superficially blank while also betraying the inner workings of a fertile mind. Like Saoirse Ronan before her, and to whom she inevitably will be compared, Clinch has beautifully expressive eyes that say more than she ever could if she opened her mouth, and she is the luminous heart of this beguiling film. Most of the dialogue is in Irish, with a smattering of English thrown in, and if you’re the type of person who blindly dismisses subtitled films, I beg you to reconsider – you’d have more to read on your shopping list, so it’s no hardship. An Cailín Ciúin recently won seven Irish Film and Television Academy awards, every one of them well deserved. This film feels like a moment in Irish cinema, a landmark we’ll look back on for years to come. And, I warn you, it carries a triumphant emotional payoff that left this old man sobbing like a baby.