The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin)

 

Director Colm Bairéad

Catherine Clinch and Andrew Bennett on the set

Producer Cleona Ní Chrualaoí, partner of the director

Irish writer Claire Keegan

THE QUIET GIRL (An Cailín Ciúin)          B                                                                                 Ireland  (95 mi)  2022  d: Colm Bairéad 

If you were mine, I’d never leave you in a house with strangers.                                            —Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley)

This is a film that is not what you expect, subdued, carefully measured, and small in scope, where the entire film is little more than a girl goes and stays with relatives, filled with everyday moments that suggest nothing out of the ordinary, yet it builds emotional complexity by creating plenty of room to breathe, allowing viewers moments of quiet reflection, something not often accessible in films of today, giving this a literary feel, where time is enlarged and expanded, very patiently developing an intrinsic relationship to Irish culture by accentuating the importance of the land and the language.  Adapted from an 85-page extended short story entitled Foster, Foster | The New Yorker (an abridged version), by Wexford author Claire Keegan, which won the Davy Byrnes Irish Writing Award in 2009, at the time the world’s richest prize for a story, now part of the school syllabus in Ireland, especially known for its warm empathy and astute observations of people, with the director, whose background is in documentaries, clearly inspired by Lynne Ramsay’s early short film GASMAN (1998), Lynne Ramsay's 1970s Christmas in Scotland YouTube (14:19), which ranks among his all-time favorites, intent on bringing his native language back to the screen.  Listed at #22 of The 50 best films of 2022 | Sight and Sound - BFI, while also among the five Oscar finalists in Best International Feature, one unique aspect of the film is its language, spoken entirely in Irish, winning seven out of ten categories at the Irish Film and Television Awards, becoming the highest-grossing Irish language film of all time, and the only one to receive an Oscar nomination.  While Gaelic refers to a group of languages, the Republic of Ireland’s official language is called Gaeilge, the name for Irish in the Irish language, yet despite being constitutionally declared the country’s official language in 1922 and a compulsory subject in Irish schools, Gaeilge’s usage has declined to the point of being declared endangered by the United Nations, estimating there are only 20,000 to 40,000 Irish speakers worldwide.  Instead, English has become the dominant spoken language of the country, a colonial legacy left behind by the British.  The history of films produced in the Irish language is disappointingly thin, Fís Éireann: Irish Language Films, where Bob Quinn’s POITÍN (1978) was the first feature film to be made entirely in Irish, and it would be thirty years before the next one, while other notable examples only utilize the language briefly, like John Sayle’s THE SECRET OF ROAN INISH (1994), Ken Loach’s The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), Steve McQueen’s HUNGER (2008), or John Michael McDonagh’s The Guard (2011).  For many speakers of the Irish language, this may be the first opportunity to hear that language spoken onscreen, given Ireland’s history of suppressing its own language on screens, in classrooms, and in homes in favor of English.  As a minority language, it’s only spoken in certain regions, in the west and northwest, and only occasionally in the south where this story is set.  One person who valiantly fought to hold onto that language is the director’s father, a teacher who only speaks Irish, helping set up an Irish-speaking school in Northern Dublin that included actor Brendan Gleeson as a student.  According to Bairéad in Motherland, Father Tongue - Curzon, he grew up in a bilingual household where his mother spoke English but his father spoke only Irish, claiming “He did this simply out of a deep-rooted belief in the value of language and a conviction that our own, declining native tongue was something worth saving.”

Most films shot in Ireland emphasize the lush greenery of the landscapes, like John Ford’s THE QUIET MAN (1952), David Lean’s Ryan's Daughter (1970), or Martin McDonagh’s The Banshees of Inisherin (2022), but this does not, instead we’re often stuck inside narrowly compressed rooms, the backseat of a car, or glancing out the window of a small kitchen, where an everpresent painting of Jesus Christ hangs on the wall.  The film retains the story’s 1981 setting, a time of turmoil in Ireland where jobs were few, money was scarce, and the violence and civil unrest from the Troubles dominated the lives of ordinary citizens (How the Troubles Began in Northern Ireland - HISTORY), yet those discussions are absent here, told instead from a child’s perspective, withholding adult conversations that wouldn’t have been understood, while also avoiding all sentimentality.  However, by eliminating the first-person perspective of the story, with no added narration, Bairéad instead utilizes silences, relying upon subtleties in capturing the loneliness and sadness of a melancholic, emotionally withdrawn nine-year-old Cáit (Catherine Clinch), as we find ourselves in rural Ireland, 1981, with Cáit seen at the outset hidden in the tall grasses of a field, listening to the sounds of nature, far away from the harsh reality of her dysfunctional family.  When she returns to her house, we quickly realize why she craves solitude, isolated even within her own family, living a life in fear of everything around her, unloved by her parents, neglected by her many siblings who are loud and obnoxious, while ridiculed by her school peers for being a slow student, where it’s evident that poverty has stripped this world of its humanity, with escape from reality being her only recourse, as she desperately tries to find her own way in the world.  Her father (Michael Patric) appears to have drinking and gambling problems, as he gambled away the money to pay workers to cultivate their fields, leaving the family even more destitute and financially troubled, with too many mouths to feed, while her mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) is already worn out and exhausted with more children than she can handle, as an unattended baby is always heard crying in the background, with another child on the way (contraception was inaccessible at that time), while Cáit is viewed as the problem child who has a tendency to wet the bed, reducing her to shame, becoming lost in her own world of daydreams.  So her mother arranges for the troublesome Cáit to spend the summer with her older, distant cousin Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and her husband Seán (Andrew Bennett), dairy farmers who live three hours away in Waterford County in southern Ireland, THE QUIET GIRL / AN CAILÍN CIÚIN (2022) movie clip YouTube (2:30), where her father is in such a rush to get back home that he leaves her suitcase in the back seat of the car as he drives off.  Abandoned by her family, left with people who may as well be strangers, with nothing whatsoever that’s familiar to her, the feeling she gets is like being dropped off on a distant planet, having no inkling what to expect, reminiscent of the sad young girls in Céline Sciamma’s Petite Maman (2021).  The dialogue is minimalist, with much of the neo-realist story conveyed without words, including period television programs heard running in the background, with a tender piano and strings-infused score composed by Stephen Rennicks, who also wrote the music for Lenny Abrahamson’s 2014 Top Ten List #10 Frank and Room (2015), resulting in a deceptively simple production, where the relationships are scarcely drawn, composed of recurring moments that reflect a life of growing up on a farm, where there are animals and chores and plenty of fresh air, and seemingly miles between neighbors.    

Cáit’s parents simply have too much on their hands to figure out what’s at the root of her inward nature, painfully shy and preferring not to speak mostly, perhaps overcompensating for the lack of attention she never seems to receive in the boisterous clutter of her home life.  Eibhlín, on the other hand, shows her kindness straightaway, very attentive to her needs, tenderly bathing her, brushing her hair, and dressing her in old clothes more suitable for farm work, while Seán remains more distant and withdrawn, busily tending to the daily work around the farm.  In something of a surprise, Eibhlín provides a moral foundation by telling her, “There are no secrets in this house.  Where there’s a secret, there’s shame—and shame is something we can do without.”  Nonetheless, when Cáit accompanies Seán on some daily chores in the barn, but wanders off, he becomes inexplicably angry at her, dispelling any notion of tranquility in the air, suggesting something far deeper lies under the surface, where secrets abound in this gigantic home that is strangely empty.  Thoroughly displeased by his impulsive response, Seán gradually displays more patience, impressed by her willingness to help sweep up in the barn (she was actually searching for another broom when she wandered off earlier) or help feed a young calf, leaving behind little biscuit treats at the breakfast table, before inventing a game to see how fast she can pick up the mail each day, running to the end of a long tree-lined road and back, something she fully enjoys, finally making her feel good about herself.  When an old neighbor dies, she witnesses a funeral service, with one of the women looking after her for a while, allowing Eibhlín and Seán to help out with the guests, but as some neighbors often do, she grows nosy, curious why she’s spending the summer before blurting out shocking personal information that takes Cáit completely by surprise, opening up old wounds, reverting back to her withdrawn demeanor, which is a a noticeable setback.  Taking her aside, Seán assures her, “You don’t have to say anything.  Always remember that.  Many’s a person who missed the opportunity to say nothing and lost much because of it.”  Both mirror each other’s personalities, stoically introverted, lacking the social grace of others, but thoughtful and hard workers nonetheless.  The cinematography by Kate McCullough captures the charm of the Irish countryside, with the sunlight flickering through the trees, with Eibhlín showing her the magic of a hidden well with “secret” skin care properties, yet a moonlit walk to the sea may be the most unforgettable setting, luminous and elegiaic, expressing its own poetry, mirroring an unseen inner transformation taking place while also conveying a child’s innocent but always careful and insightful observations of the world.  On a parallel track, Seán also sings a song in Irish-Gaelic, which is heard but never seen, one of the small wonders beautifully interwoven into the film.  A gentle and restrained story of innate kindness contrasted against the stark neglect and abuse of her home life, the dramatic power is achieved through a meticulous rhythmic structure built upon daily routines, where the accumulation of small, mundane moments resembles the precision of Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce,1080 Bruxelles (1976), newly listed at #1 on the BFI Sight and Sound greatest films of all time poll (Revealed: the results of the 2022 Sight and Sound Greatest ...), especially the way it leads to a cathartic emotional release at the end, with buried emotions finally rising to the surface, conveying the pervasive influence of intergenerational trauma.

Licorice Pizza

 

Director Paul Thomas Anderson

Bradley Cooper on the set

 

 

 

 

LICORICE PIZZA                B                                                                                                 USA  (133 mi)  2021  ‘Scope d: Paul Thomas Anderson

A nostalgic 1970’s, coming-of-age, love hurts fantasy, from the director previously responsible for eight features, including HARD EIGHT (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch-Drunk Love (2002), the last three all set in the San Fernando Valley of greater Los Angeles, yet also There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), and Phantom Thread (2017).  While mostly a personal exploration that feels recognizable and even contemporary, this is a return back to life in the Valley of the director’s childhood, where a common theme throughout Anderson’s career has been a myriad of hustlers and con artists, suggesting he’s a man who enjoys a good scam, including gamblers, pornographers, motivational speakers, oilmen, cult leaders, a stoner private eye, and the dark side of Adam Sandler’s comic persona, which may be a prevalent theme of growing up in Los Angeles, where people never age, apparently, but remain stuck in a kind of arrested adolescence, living in a narcissistic world that revolves totally around themselves, where little else matters.  Anderson tends to take a subset of American culture and use it to explore themes of loneliness, alienation, and a disconnection from family, with Magnolia still thought of as his most epic and intimate film, largely influenced by the death of his father, Ernie Anderson, who was a voice artist, with this director being the only one of his children to follow him into the movie business.  In his more recent films, Anderson’s central characters of Doc Sportello and Reynolds Woodcock were narcissistic, center-of-the-universe figures who felt the world revolved around them, with the director surrounding them with the meticulous detail of their working environment, submerging themselves into it with the entirety of their being.  But then there is the sour relationship between Barry and his sisters in Punch-Drunk Love, the destruction of the relationship between Daniel Plainview and his adopted son H.W. in There Will Be Blood, leading to the tragic figure of Daniel, a staggeringly rich oilman, living alone in his massive house with no one but his servants, and there is Freddie Quell in The Master, a traumatized war veteran whose drunken wanderings and search for any human relationship lead him to a charismatic cult leader, with roots back to the misogynistic pick-up artist/motivational speaker of Frank T.J. Mackey in Magnolia.  All of this takes us back to P.T. Barnum, an American showman, businessman, and politician remembered for promoting celebrated hoaxes and founding the Barnum & Bailey Circus, who coined the expression, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”  The consumer culture of Los Angeles, with its vast advertising and show business culture, suggests there’s an ever-growing business founded upon the principle of wanting to take your money, giving rise to start-up entrepreneurs and fly-by-night schemes.  Every new Anderson film reminds us of that lengthy LA Times profile written by Patrick Goldstein back in 1999, The New New Wave - Los Angeles Times, revealing a brash new Hollywood auteur who had the ear of Francis Ford Coppola and dined with Warren Beatty, who wanted to be seen in public with his famous friends and drawn into the spotlight that is Hollywood while exhibiting complete creative freedom and an exacting level of control over every aspect of the production and release of his films, right down to editing the trailer himself.  Shot on 70mm by Paul Thomas Anderson and Michael Bauman, this is lighter and sunnier than previous Anderson pictures, a brightly embellished and absurdly exaggerated remembrance of things past, with long takes, slow dollies, and contemplative pans galore, where movement is a constant in this film, yet what inevitably stands out are those memorable tracking shots of the lead protagonists running, all rooted with Denis Levant in the Léos Carax film Mauvais Sang (Bad Blood) (1986), set to David Bowie’s “Modern Love,” Modern Love - Mauvais sang (2:45), recreated by Noah Baumbach in Frances Ha (2012) with Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha [2013] - Dance in the street - YouTube (1:08).

While these protagonists are significantly younger, it nonetheless offers Anderson another glimpse into the myriad of his youth, using real-life stories told to him from childhood friend Gary Goetzman, a hero and mentor of Anderson, now a film and television producer, but he was a child actor who starred in a Lucille Ball film YOURS, MINE AND OURS (1968), appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show, and eventually started a waterbed company and a pinball arcade, as depicted in the film, actually delivering a waterbed to the home of Jon Peters, a former Hollywood hairdresser to the stars and rampant womanizer, supposedly the model for the Warren Beatty film SHAMPOO (1975), also a former partner of Barbara Streisand.  The outlandish sequence of events becomes the framework for the film, always exhibiting a masterclass of topical musical selections, as this boy meets girl scenario is based on an improbable romance, which is more of an extended flirtation between a 15-year child actor Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman, son of the late Philip Seymour Hoffman) and a girl ten years older than him, Alana, Alana Haim of the pop band Haim, a sisters pop rock group, with the Anderson-directed music video preceding the film in theaters.  While the phrase Licorice Pizza is never used in the film, it is named after a former chain of record shops in southern California, basically an excuse for Anderson to visualize a series of anecdotes immersed within that whitewashed urban landscape where minorities don’t exist except on the margins, offering a sharply detailed and satirically motivated, yet wry commentary on growing up fast, creating a netherworld between childhood adolescence and adulthood, a place both groups seem to linger for a prolonged period of time, a place between Hollywood and suburbia, becoming a purgatory of lost dreams and adolescent fantasy.  Let’s call it Encino.  Gary is something of a high school hustler and a schemer, possessed with charisma and charm, always coming across as overly familiar, on a first name basis with everyone he meets, as if he’s known them forever.  Alana, on the other hand, feels stuck, working as a photographer’s assistant, yet bored, having no ambition to aspire to anything else, having never quite found her place in the world, so she’s kind of going through the motions.  When Gary immediately hits on her while waiting in line during high school class picture day, she disparages him as just a kid, yet his go-getter attitude is truly inspiring, swooning interest, as if romantically infatuated, immediately asking her out to dinner.  While they immediately click in wisecracks and satirical comebacks, she actually has fun with the verbal sparring, as the kid more than holds his own, surprising herself by actually showing up, but what does she have to lose?  It’s not like anything better is going on in her life, surrounded by older sisters who pretty much frown upon her anyway, with her actual family playing themselves in the film, while Anderson’s own family, including his four children and their friends, all play bit parts as well.  Why not also include Leonardo DiCaprio’s dad, Tim Conway’s son, and Steven Spielberg’s daughter, and feature the Mikado Restaurant, the first Japanese restaurant in the San Fernando Valley, and the now defunct Tail O’ the Cock restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City, just a block west of Coldwater Canyon, a place where stars ate while working at nearby Warner Bros. Studios and CBS Studio Center, but their specialty was serving martinis, including the traditional business meeting three-martini-lunch.  Both Gary and Alana are reckless and impulsive, easily carried away by stupidity, wanting to be somewhere, but really finding themselves nowhere at all, with Gary completely full of himself, thinking the world completely revolves around him, while Alana remains stuck in an existential crisis, wondering why on earth she’s hanging out with a 15-year old kid and his friends.  Yet they have fun together, taking a plane ride to New York where she acts as his chaperone for an appearance on a television talk show, with Lucy Doolittle (Christine Ebersole) doing her best Lucille Ball impression, growing thoroughly exasperated by his prankish behavior, perhaps putting the kibosh on his child acting career, where once you enter puberty, you’re done.    

While there’s a sweet innocence to their growing relationship, never devolving into sex, it’s a passionate affair nonetheless, with Alana helping out on his grandiose, get-rich-quick moneymaking projects, joining in on the genuine enthusiasm, where at least for a short while they feel like they’re actually doing something important, fulfilling an order or providing a service, yet Gary remains something of a goofball, while Alana always remains outside the showbiz world that he thrives in, something he braggishly reminds her about all the time, yet she has the chutzpah to remind him, “You’re not my director,” so there are rough edges that at least suggest to viewers this will never work.  Yet somehow, it does, even if the attraction is largely lopsided at first, buoyed by male hormones, yet there’s no one else in her life filling the void, often leading to moments of petty jealousy and extreme disappointment.  Arguably the most emotional sequence happens on her own, attaching herself to a struggling mayoral campaign of Joel Wachs (Bennie Safdie), where she’s called late at night to meet him in a restaurant, only to discover he’s gay, and that she’s been unceremoniously called upon to escort his gay lover home, Matthew (Joseph Cross), both clearly embarrassed at having to hide who they are, offering him a hug when no words could possibly capture that feeling of deflation.  Still, the couple captures the complicated emotions that come with an untraditional relationship, exploring all the ecstatic highs and devastating lows of young love, with Alana questioning what her future will look like if she continues hanging out with him.  Gary is used to the rigors of being a child star, but discovers he’s in no way prepared for adult responsibilities, while Alana is also put in an uncomfortable position, learning that she hasn’t quite figured out what she wants to do, an age-old dilemma for teenagers and budding adults.  She’s embarrassed to have awkward conversations with her family about her ambivalence regarding having no plans for the future, yet both characters realize that they have much more in common than they initially expected, with both exhibiting a fierce independent streak.  While Gary and Alana are more mature and self-sufficient than most other romance films about young adults, they aren’t sure how to express their feelings for each other, as he is very open and often manically expressive, while she is more reserved and emotionally closed off.  This certainly bears a similarity to Tarantino’s equally nostalgic trip down memory lane in Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood (2019), but there’s no historical revisionism going on here, with Anderson creating a warmer, hilariously deadpan comedy filled with absurdist moments that may have more in common with Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998) with its 15-year old protagonist (also born into Hollywood royalty) with romantic aspirations who similarly speaks to adults as if he’s on the same level and has his own harebrained schemes that run amok, or the self-deprecating humor of Submarine (2010), which follows a lonely 15-year-old who makes a checklist of everything he wants to accomplish by the time he graduates high school, where at the top of the list is having his first relationship, which doesn’t exactly go as planned.  And of course, the granddaddy of all nostalgia films is American Graffiti (1973), with a wall-to-wall musical score referencing the 50’s, similarly exploring the music, culture, and social changes that defined young people during this particular period in history.  Although layered in humor, Anderson tells an authentic story about real people, whose hopes, fears, and emotions are genuinely realistic given the circumstances they are in, a skill Anderson shares with one of his contemporaries, Richard Linklater, the unofficial king of hangout movies and maker of Dazed and Confused (1993) and Everybody Wants Some !! (2016), both revealing the hilarious and heartbreaking mistakes that young adults make when left to their own devices with no adult anywhere to be seen.  While Gary and Alana are very naive, they may have more wisdom than any of the adults in the story, revealing something about fading Hollywood movie stars, like the heavily inebriated Sean Penn as an aging William Holden and Tom Waits as filmmaker Mark Robson, or the breakout performance of Bradley Cooper as Jon Peters, embellished with a comic exaggeration, as they cling to their youth with a kind of delusional obsession by continually reliving past glories, apparently lost without them, pathetically viewing them as highlight reels on a continuously repeating cycle, sadly embellishing their stories over cocktails to anyone willing to listen.  Although looking back at a pivotal decade of social change in this country, where the divisive stain of the Vietnam War was still everpresent, the environment Alana faced included the Women’s Liberation Movement in full swing, Roe v. Wade had recently legalized abortion, more women were college educated than any other period in US history, yet only 13.3 per cent of those with a BA degree entered the work force, while the oil crisis was an alarming reminder that economic stability was not certain, which may explain why Alana is queasy about the future, yet Anderson doesn’t really address any of that, which may reveal his limitations as a director, never really addressing social concerns, creating instead an apolitical film that is a reminder of what it feels like to be young.  Despite the wide breadth of years between them, they bring an unbridled enthusiasm to the screen, free to screw up and make mistakes on their own, with a tendency to pull the audience in with the rush and mad exhilaration of a wild ride.