A lesson in dark duplicity
THANKS to books like Angela’s Ashes, the Irish misery-memoir has become an accepted genre of storytelling, on page and screen. Actually, if we’re going to quibble about it, James Joyce started it in 1914, with his story collection Dubliners.
These had all the hallmarks, the mud, the rain, the drink, the flogging priests and the narrow views. PAULA (BBC2), the first TV series from award-winning playwright Conor McPherson isn’t exactly your classic, Guinnesssodden miseryfest but it’s no joy to behold either.
The central triangle, at first, was between a married PE teacher, an unmarried colleague teaching chemistry at the same boys’ school, and a Scouse rat-catcher. Comparisons might have been made to this year’s earlier hit Apple Tree Yard but the only element in common, to be honest, is the extra-marital sex.
Apple Tree Yard had charismatic characters, Westminster alleyways, posh bars. This has the school chemistry labs, an infested cellar and the back of some bloke’s van. The bloke in question, itinerant odd-job man James (Tom Hughes) is frustratingly vague on screen. He says he comes from Liverpool, seems charming but he has two wives, or two women who live with him as wives.
Invited to sort out the problem in chemistry teacher Paula’s (Denise Gough) damp cellar, he realises she is having an affair with the married Phil (Edward MacLiam), and even though the romance has ended, he has a go at blackmailing him.
Plagued as he is by odd childhood flashbacks and the feeling that there’s a ghost in the back of his van, James doesn’t handle the first transaction very well. He beats Phil to death in a scrapyard (another charming setting) and dumps his body in a quarry. It was a relief to see the Gardaí Detective “Mac” McArthur (Owen McDonnell) joining the ensemble just at the end of the first episode, not least because no one else, thus far, had been remotely watchable.
At the start and end of JAGO: A LIFE UNDERWATER (BBC4), the film’s subject summed himself up in succinct fashion. For his prowess at diving and spear-fishing, 80-year-old Bajau tribesman Rohani had long been called Jago, the master.
To himself, though, he was just “oran rau”, a man of the sea. There were many times, throughout James Morgan and James Reed’s beautiful, almost poem-like film, when Rohani and the sea surrounding him seemed one.
One of Indonesia’s Bajau people, he lived in a stilt house right over the water. The sea winked through the many holes in the floor, and whenever Rohani chose, he could slip from one world to the other. At the same time, describing his fears for the future (could he keep on diving, fishing, eating?), he sounded like many 80-year-olds.
The light that came into his eyes when he described meeting his wife, the darkness that came into them when he talked about the death of his son, these were things we could all understand.
Many films of this kind go down one route at the expense of the other. They try to show how identical the tribe are to us and risk trivialising their struggles, their bravery, the dangers they face.
It’s that, or they show them as completely different, so deeply in tune with nature that they are part of it, in ways we have forgotten. This film wove the strands together like a fisherman mending his nets.