A sensitive young schoolgirl spends a life-changing summer away from her troubled family in Irish writer-director Colm Bairead’s impressively assured debut feature, The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin). Beautifully filmed and meticulously acted, with mostly Gaelic-language dialogue, this slight but engrossing coming-of-age drama opened the Dublin film festival yesterday still buzzing from its prize-winning world premiere at the Berlinale last week in the Generation Kplus section.
Building on a modest canon of shorts and TV work, Bairéad’s first feature already feels like a headline-grabbing success story in Ireland, where the Irish language has extra cultural cachet and a subtle but unavoidably political dimension. It is currently tying with Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast as front-runner for prizes at the key industry IFTA awards next month, with 10 nominations each. Crafted by a high-calibre team, The Quiet Girl has strong festival credentials and solid art-house release potential. When Ireland gets around to nominating its next Oscar submission for best international film, this bittersweet gem is sure to be a contender.
The Quiet Girl is based on Claire Keegan’s feted short story Foster, which has been embraced as something of a modern Irish standard since its 2010 publication, even appearing on the school literature curriculum. Keegan’s slender original text was written in English, driven by dialogue, and even hinted at lightly supernatural elements. Bairéad’s bilingual but Gaelic-heavy adaptation adds an explanatory opening act, and arguably loses some of the humour in translation, particularly the eccentric phrasing and colorful colloquialisms of the speech. But it works fine on its own stand-alone terms, the rare pleasure of hearing the indigenous Irish tongue on the big screen adding an extra later of beauty for culturally curious non-native speakers, even though it will likely limit the film’s potential global audience.
In her striking screen debut, 12-year-old Catherine Clinch radiates magnetic stillness as Cáit, the quiet girl of the title, a nervous daydreamer growing up in an impoverished farming family in a sleepy corner of early 1980s Ireland. Bullied at school and neglected at home, Cáit is caught in the perpetually fractious crossfire between her heavily pregnant mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) and her boozy, womanising, hot-tempered father (Michael Patric). She masks her anxiety behind a mournfully blank expression, but it manifests in wetting the bed and in lonely, solitary wandering. The film maintains her childlike viewpoint, innocent about adult behaviour but still buffeted by complex parental tensions that she barely understands.
Cáit’s bleak summer prospects change unexpectedly one day when her father takes her on a long drive, leaving her without warning at the house of an older couple, Eibhlin (Carrie Crowley) and Seán (Andrew Bennett). Savouring the luxury of a grander house, her own bedroom and studiously kind attention from her new foster parents, Cáit slowly begins to blossom. “There are no secrets in this house,” Eibhlin assures her, a little too emphatically. This cautiously phrased oath will later prove not wholly accurate, and serve as part of Cáit’s dawning initiation into adulthood. She is not the only character on an emotional journey in The Quiet Girl. Seán is initially gruff and distant towards his temporary step-daughter, for reasons which eventually become clear, but the pair gradually form a warm bond. Their night-time visit to a deserted beach is touched with sorrowful magic.
Suffused with the nostalgic haze and muted colour palette of a faded Kodachrome snapshot, The Quiet Girl has a dreamy aesthetic, more artful than its surface sheen of low-key domestic realism initally suggests. Recalling the charged intimacy of film-makers like Lynne Ramsay or Andrea Arnold, the tightly focused, high-resolution, Academy-ratio cinematography of Kate McCullough builds on her superlative work on the globally acclaimed TV miniseries Normal People (2000). A hovering, undulating, insinuating score by Stephen Rennicks, another Normal People veteran, maintains a steady throb of emotional unease that slides a little incongruously into psychological horror terrain at times. Bairéad has made a film of small pleasures and subtle shades, but it punches above its weight emotionally and leaves a haunting afterglow.
Director: Colm Bairéad
Cast: Catherine Clinch, Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett, Kate Nic Chonaonaigh, Michael Patric
Screenwriter: Colm Bairéad., based on the short story Foster by Claire Keegan
Producer: Cleona Ni Chrualaoi
Cinematography: Kate McCullough
Editing: John Murphy
Production design: Emma Lowney
Music: Stephen Rennicks
Production company: Insceal (Ireland)
International sales: Rosa Bosch
Venue: Berlin International Film Festival (Generation Kplus)
In Irish, English
94 minutes
