This has been a watershed year at the Oscars for Ireland! The Banshees of Inisherin, an intensely Irish film, is one of the most-nominated, including for its’ entire principal cast (and it has a not inconceivable shot at winning Best Picture). Paul Mescal is also nominated for his performance in Aftersun, giving Ireland claim to a quarter of the acting nominees. And then sitting conspicuously in the Best International Film category is The Quiet Girl, a small Irish drama set in the Waterford County countryside and told almost entirely in the Irish language.
It’s very rare to see a movie made in Irish, confined as it is as a dialect to simply the rural Gaeltacht regions of Ireland where it has less than 200,000 native speakers. The one time I remember it being used in a movie was as a joke in The Guard. But as someone who did inconceivably take Irish as a language course in college for a semester, that was the most novel selling point of The Quiet Girl, which is a spotlight of the language as much as anything.
The plot is rather slight, but melancholy –based on a book called Foster by Claire Keegan. A girl called Cáit (Catherine Clinch), a quiet, neglected daughter of a large family that often ignores or mistreats her is sent to live with distant relatives for a time until her mother’s new baby comes. Left at their home with her father even forgetting to unload her one suitcase, Cáit gradually comes out of her shell in the warmth of the kindly EibhlÃn (Carrie Crowley) and crusty Seán Cinnsealach (Andrew Bennett).
Written and directed by Colm Bairéad, there’s an amiable simplicity to the relationship quickly established between Cáit and her temporary foster parents. It’s most directly reminiscent to me of the early chapters of Taika Waititi’s Hunt for the Wilderpeople, also featuring a withdrawn kid doted on by a nurturing mother while alienated from a seemingly ambivalent father. But there’s nothing so irreverent in this film, which is respectfully solemn about the lack of love or guidance in Cáit’s life up to this point. It plays her family experience with the sense of tragedy it deserves and casts as their surrogates a pair of seemingly ideal grandparent-like figures. Their home is sweet and inviting, their behaviour inoffensive -beaming and open where her own family house is dark and constricting. With every new moment of contentment, each bare minimum showing of empathy in this new environment, the harsher her ordinary life is thrown into contrast. And though the movie hardly acknowledges it for a while, the ticking clock of when she’ll have to be sent back is ever on the mind.
Bairéad doesn’t fill out the story much -apart from the gradual warming of Seán to Cáit and a third act revelation of a shameful detail of the Cinnsealach’s past, the film just lives in its’ space with these people and the charming mundaneness of their lives. We see a couple of the poker games that Seán hosts with friends on a regular basis, getting a sense of the general vibe of the people in their periphery, and their character. Cáit is often an observer to this culture that is somewhat like her own (her family speaks Irish at home, English in public), but is still relatively removed. She’s an ideal audience surrogate in this way and a subtly nuanced child character -one who communicates little, but whose demeanour speaks volumes. She is both willfully solitary and lonely, imaginative, has avenues of untapped expression, and is herself burdened by an all-too-mature understanding that she is a burden to her parents.
The movie does a fine job accentuating the harsh facts that Cáit is exposed to. She learns from a gossipy neighbour the exact nature of the trauma that the Cinnsealachs are still reeling from and that accounts on some level for their relationship towards her. Indeed they seem an odd anomaly, as even the few other adults we see are a touch dismissive of Cáit outright. The movie is set in the 1980s and Cáit does seem a fairly standard “weird kid”, but it also shows how that alienation she feels is more than just personal -and it reinforces the role adults must play in the emotional well-being of children. Only EibhlÃn really seems to understand that. Crowley gives the best performance of the film, emanating a humble, earnest tenderness that connects so keenly and so directly with our sympathies. Bennett is really quite good too, especially as he gradually becomes more sentimental toward Cáit, culminating in a performance that almost single-handedly determines the effect of the ending. Credit must be allotted to Clinch too though, so real, reserved, and subtle in a way that borders on craft from this nine-year-old.
All of this is quite impressive, but the film does make for a dull affair at times. The story is very thin and Bairéad’s direction hasn’t much character to buoy the naturalism in an interesting way. Any vestige of a main conflict largely disappears for much of the runtime, notably once Seán warms to Cáit. And while there are strong moments within this, like that aforementioned reveal and a great moment where Cáit falls into a well that is both illustrated superbly visually and hits a perfect thematic note, it is a case where the movie’s brevity is a virtue.
I suspect its’ principal purpose though, more than the story itself, is as a showcase of the Gaeltacht and the Irish language. Throughout the movie there is an undercurrent of Gaelic pride, only a couple characters are seen using English for convenience, the world around them functions perfectly in this isolated region and dialect. There’s a sense of the film associating a certain temperament, even an ideal, with these old Gaeltacht communities that is absent in those spaces of English adjacency. Cáit’s home may be rural, but her sisters will speak English, and be seen in those uniforms linked to the British school system. It’s not just the comforting air of the Cinnsealachs that makes for the shift in mood while in their home -there’s another rationale to it, one that relates across some cultures in terms of the values connected to these old rural villages.
The ending is going to break your heart. It felt to me similar to that final scene from Shoplifters, relaying much a similar message. The Quiet Girl is still a melancholy movie for its’ open heart, it’s still a tragedy. And with its’ final moments especially it imparts some thoughtful wisdom on love and family, what they mean to children, and where they are. If nothing else from this movie works, that at least will stick with you.
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