A QUIET WORK OF WONDER
Irish-language gem ‘has a power and resonance that lingers’
Oh my goodness, An Cailín Ciúin (The Quiet Girl) is a truly beautiful and deeply moving work of cinematic wonder. If you are the sort of film-goer who only ventures into arthouse territory a couple of times a year, this Irish gem – exquisitely directed by Dubliner Colm Bairéad – has got to be one of them.
Based on a novella by Claire Keegan this Irish-language film tells the story of Cáit (Catherine Clinch) a young girl growing up on an impoverished farm in rural Ireland in the early 1980s. Barely 10, Cáit already feels like an outsider – bullied and struggling at school, hardly speaking at home and wetting the bed at night.
But her life is transformed when she is suddenly sent away to live with an older couple on another farm and, for the first time in her short, unhappy life, experiences real kindness.
But how long will it last? We don’t know and nor does shy, hesitant Cáit. Clinch is wonderful but so too is Carrie Crowley, who plays Eibhlín, the woman who quickly becomes more of a mother to Cáit than her own ever was. This is a film about innocence and loneliness, secrets and sadness and has a power and resonance that definitely linger.
First there was Spider-Man, then Dr Strange and now – just one week later – there is Evelyn Wang, a middle-aged Chinese-American launderette owner who in Everything, Everywhere, All At Once suddenly discovers – on a trip to her local tax office, as it happens – that she can slip from one multiverse to another and experience some of the alternate lives she might have lived. Or is actually living, according to multiverse theory.
Directed by film-making duo Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and starring Michelle Yeoh, Jamie Lee Curtis and the guy who
IF YOU ONLY SEE A FEW ARTHOUSE FILMS A YEAR, THIS HAS GOT TO BE ONE OF THEM
was once Short Round in Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom, this chaotic, zany and, at times, contrived-feeling picture is being enthusiastically hyped by cinema’s cool kids but left me underwhelmed, despite its deliberately crowd-pleasing ‘feel-good’ story. Never mind, no doubt I thoroughly enjoyed it in another universe.
Gaspard Noe is one of the enfants terrible of French cinema, notorious for films featuring excessive sex or violence and sometimes both. But even enfants terrible grow older and in Vortex he focuses on the terrible trials of old age as we watch a once intellectual and creative couple – she a psychiatrist, he a film buff – battling dementia and ill-health.
It’s painfully slow at times, slightly over-wrought and not exactly cheering but some of Noe’s creative touches are lovely and Francoise Lebrun is fabulous as Elle.
Father Stu is not only the title of Mark Wahlberg’s new film it’s also a spoiler in that this is the apparently true story of Stuart Long (Wahlberg) who was originally a boxer, then became an unsuccessful actor and finally set out to become, er... a Catholic priest.
Inevitably, religion features prominently in a film that never quite grips, despite the best endeavours of Wahlberg and Mel Gibson in a rare supporting role. But then it is directed by his partner, Rosalind Ross.