Patrick: What are you gawking at?
Joe: At how the rafters frame the sky. The squares of light are more interesting than the open sky, more human. And then the whole sky goes out from that small space.
Patrick: People have been locked up for saying less.
Exceptional despite, or because of, Collins’ significant formal changes to his source. The richness of McGahern’s novel, the time allowed, by reading, to absorb its rhythms and truths, is lost. But the film,…
This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.
[Follow-Up Review. My first is here.]
At a recent Irish Studies conference in Galway, I talked about Colm Bairéad’s adaptation of Claire Keegan’s short story. While the most obvious change is the director’s translation of the text from English to Irish, he also significantly altered the characters of Cáit and Dan, Cáit’s father.
Bairéad’s said that the adaptation was a personal ‘act of remembrance, of revisiting’ his past. It paid a debt to his father, a Gaeilgeoir or Irish language…
‘What sort of parents are we? (over the course of a few silent minutes, she slowly collects Ann’s sheets, which she’d washed earlier, and folds them. She walks slowly upstairs to Ann’s room, sits on her bed, and sobs, staring into the camera as the film ends)
- Mrs Lovett
In January 1984, 15-year-old Ann Lovett gave birth beside an outdoor grotto in small town Ireland. The baby, named Pat, was stillborn. Ann died in hospital. While the tragedy’s often…
‘“Don't let anyone fool you, Zsófia” he would say to me as a struggling young mother raising my daughter during our first years in Jerusalem, “no matter what the others try and sell you, it is the destination, not the journey.” Thank you.’
- Zsófia
‘I've found our conversation persuasive and intellectually stimulating.’
- Harrison Lee van Buren, Sr
Director/co-writer Corbet’s accomplishments in The Brutalist, on an independent budget, are considerable: its images are often stunning, its acting often superb.…
‘No one says a word, is that clear?’
- Cesare
Novelistic and natural, deeply communitarian and delicately composed, writer/director Maura Delpero’s finely crafted film is, in many respects, traditional: a kind of snow cinema of rural rhythms, seasons and sacraments, births and deaths, hymns and hers, in the shadow of war. Women are its centre, as they are for its village, as mothers, wives, daughters, and even saints (the Sicilian Santa Lucia, celebrated in December in a festival of light).…
