By Christopher Sharrett.
The conclusion of the film makes a basic point: the biological family is often inauthentic, the authentic family a matter of individual will, with affection created by need, and a deep kinship not often subject to accidents of flesh.”
Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl wasn’t ignored during the recent “awards season,” but neither was it as celebrated as it clearly deserved. When watching the film, I could not help but think of Songs of Innocence and of Experience, so Blakean is the film’s deceptive simplicity, its observation of beauty, its sad ironies and embodiment of awfulness as it portrays the essence of the human – in human beauty and creativity. Also in my mind was F.R. Leavis’s famous admonitory remark, “Life is a necessary word,” a simple insistent statement, very essential today as clear appreciations of the human are still drowned in the backwash of “theory,” suffocated by ever-increasing forces of reaction and repression, which, at this writing, are preventing young people in parts of this country from studying nude sculptures of the Quattrocento, depriving them of familiarity with the truthful and beautiful – therefore, with the foundation of knowledge.
Cait (Catherine Clinch) is a ten-year-old girl living on a somewhat ominous farm, with dark roof and stone walls, with her mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) and many siblings, and a drunken, brutish father (Michael Patric), who digs at her; given Cait’s inclination toward hiding things, and keeping “secrets,” we can assume something else is going on of immense evil – but if we assume the father is sexually abusive of Cait, would he not demand her presence all the time, rather than allowing her to me turned over for a time to his wife’s cousin Eibhlin (Carrie Crowley)? But turned over she is, as Cait’s mother prepares to have another child to burden her overburdened life, filling patriarchal demands.
Eibhlin embraces Cait immediately, physically and emotionally, giving her affection from which she was obviously deprived. At first, there seems to be a complication in Eibhlin’s husband Sean (Andrew Bennett), who remains distant. When it comes time for bed, Eibhlin escorts Cait to the threshold of the room where Sean watches television; they wish him “good night” without passing the archway, suggesting that the male demarcation remains inviolate. But the rules are not really gender rules; they are Sean’s way of keeping children distant given the accidental death of a child years earlier.
Sean’s distance becomes modified. But Cait has internalized the strictures of her parental household. She pulls the chamber pot from under her bed, but hesitates when a shadow appears on the stairs. The moment is doubly alarming; Cait may be frightened of the approaching pedophile as much as she is ashamed, taught to hate her own body and its functions, taught that every activity has its time limits, as the household and its female inhabitants are policed to the last second. But Cait is misreading things. Every touch from Eibhlin transmits affection and freedom; the temporary mother affirms the child as a female person. At first, Cait is given the son’s old clothes, but Eibhlin knows this is inappropriate to the new child in their midst. Sean loses his reserve and controlling grief from the past; he leaves a cream-filled cookie for her, the confection framed on the kitchen tablecloth as a precious object. He intuits what Cait desires. Sensing that she wants to run, he gives her an errand that becomes a game. She is asked to take the mail to postbox at the end of the road. She runs, a smile expanding on her face, these moments expressive of all manner of human liberation. This freedom is conjoined to quotidian chores; she helps Sean with the cows, with cleaning away manure, and getting water from the well (where she is cautioned to take care – the dead child’s presence haunting all). Nature provides a benediction to the sheer joy Cait discovers. The trees framing the road form a high bower; the well water is luminous; the wallpaper of her bedroom (unchanged since the son’s death) features cartoon images of a locomotive. All of this assures us of the beneficence of the natural world, and the goodness of human intent. Yet, the world of Dickens is also here, leavening optimism, as the time of Cait’s return to her actual family looms. The moment is anticipated by near-tragedy – Cait falls in the well, a moment we don’t see, only her return, soaking wet, miraculously saved. Eibhlin is overjoyed to see her, yet we can anticipate the approaching wrath of the biological father, the rule-maker.
The obligations of institutions, and expected practice, so often overrule natural affection, and the demands of human instinct that build mutual trust and support.”
The moment comes. Sean and Eibhlin return Cait to the brute’s house, dark inside and out, the female inhabitants having hardly an inch in which to move, as the brute says derisive remarks. He insists, it seems, on producing more daughters simply so he has more targets for his misogynist venom, the form of self-hatred that wants destruction of the female element itself.
The conclusion of the film, with Cait running to catch up with her adoptive parents as they drive down the road, makes a basic point: the biological family is often inauthentic, the authentic family a matter of individual will, with affection created by need, and a deep kinship not often subject to accidents of flesh. The brutish father walks after Cait; she leaps into Sean’s arms and murmurs “Daddy”, as the brute approaches. She says the same word as she puts her face onto Sean’s shoulder. It is a moment of confusion, tension, fear, yet it is instructive to her and to us. This is a moment of primal decision that will probably go unresolved in her lifetime, as it does for many of us. The obligations of institutions, and expected practice, so often overrule natural affection, and the demands of human instinct that build mutual trust and support.
The Season
Each year I feel sickened by the awards frenzy – and the commercial cinema represents. Yet I feel obliged to take notice of these rituals.”
Each year I feel sickened by the awards frenzy – and the commercial cinema represents. Yet I feel obliged to take notice of these rituals. The moral judgment seems to get worse with each round of this self-congratulation.
Everything Everywhere All at Once. Indeed. This film’s title, and its dependence on the “multiverse” conceit, is postmodernity’s equivalence for capitalism’s promise of consumer plentitude, of all things being possible, and that everything will work out in the end. The “multiverse,” the sketchiest, most unsupported of ideas from theoretical physics, works well enough in the comic book cinema (the DC and Marvel “universes,” another term for corporate power), but here is simply ludicrous. The excuse for showering Everything with awards is its celebration of Asian actors—this is to insult the many masterpieces by Asian artists, including Ozu, Mizoguchi, Satyajit Ray, and not a few others. It seems that Asian accomplishment must be within the confines of drivel, like all else.
Elvis. Baz Luhrmann has been dubbed a “maximalist” filmmaker, throwing in all manner of excessive technique in his ill-conceived projects. Elvis misses some essential points: Elvis Presley dominated Fifties popular culture like no other artist; between 1954 and 1960, he made a body of music that The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, David Bowie and countless other rock and roll stars tried to copy. As talented as they are – and Presley wasn’t a songwriter – they couldn’t quite reach his effectiveness. Although the artists of the Sixties and Seventies brought great joy, ingenuity, and a feeling of liberation that exceeded Presley’s, few could replicate what he accomplished. Although a Southern conservative, Presley and his art were important to attacking the reaction and repression of the Cold War era. His music and presence are impossible to replicate in other artworks, certainly not this garish monstrosity.
Elvis misses what is most significant: Elvis Presley’s story was a terrible tragedy. The various accounts mostly ignore this, perhaps out of fear of what his rise and fall tell us about America. Some accounts are honest, like the two-volume biography by Peter Guralnick, the book by Dave Marsh, the long, definitive essay by Greil Marcus, and even the disgusting 1980 book by Albert Goldman, about which Marcus said: “The torrents of hate that drive this book are unrelieved.” Presley came from extreme poverty and was deathly afraid of returning to it. His “management,” the criminal from the Netherlands who used the name “Colonel Tom Parker,” tried to sanitize his art as he played on Presley’s insecurities, removed him from the rock culture of the Sixties, and consigned him to a series of mostly awful films (the exceptions, early on, are Loving You, Jailhouse Rock, King Creole, and Flaming Star, films that revealed his natural instincts as an actor – he was offered parts in Tennessee Williams adaptations, and a remake of A Star is Born, all turned down by the management concerned with Presley’s “image”) that made him, by his own account, “feel physically ill” when he approached the set each day. Elvis allows this nightmare grotesquerie a few happy seconds. Presley played endless shows in Las Vegas to pay off Parker’s gambling debts, while Elvis slowly killed himself with drugs and a ghastly junk food diet. Parker, the criminal who ruined Presley, is portrayed as a cute, tubby Mephistopheles by Tom Hanks, for a few decades now Hollywood’s replacement for James Stewart, of a singularly bland, uninspired sort. And we are asked to see the actor Austin Butler as a virtual doppelganger for Elvis Presley. He is nothing of the sort, even as we are today asked to accept nonsense like Butler “channeling” Elvis to the extent that he can’t today get rid of the voice he used in the film.
Top Gun: Maverick. The only reason I could imagine the film industry lauding such a film is simple: it sold tickets and had “legs.” With Everything Everywhere, it kept theaters open in the wake of the COVID plague, so for this we should be grateful – the theatrical experience fades away, with cinema now confined to a few inches on the back pages of the Sunday New York Times Arts & Leisure section, where before it was a principal feature. Otherwise, Maverick is just another marker for the militarization of popular culture, as Hollywood turns films into rollercoaster rides (theme parks are invoked without embarrassment today in movie advertisements; such has been the case for several decades).
But we can continue to look to the past and the future. New editions of La Regle du Jeu will soon be released by BFI and Criterion. A new film by Cristian Mingiu is in release as I write this. Let us try to live in hope.
Christopher Sharrett is Professor Emeritus at Seton Hall University. He is a Contributing Editor for Film International.