The Quiet Girl

I have signed up for the newsletter of the nearby Arts venue Pontio. Among other things, it is a cinema. The cinema, by the way, is also in use as a lecture theatre; I have lectured in there. I like it! You can imagine how big the screen is. But that aside; I personally am not very convinced of Pontio; I think it's struggling to decide whether it is a University building or an actual arts venue. And when it comes to cinema, it shows blockbusters about 95% of the time. I'm not interested in blockbusters! But a few times a month, they tend to show much smaller films, and these can be worthwhile.

The last film I had seen had been Belfast. And that I've been amazing! I really enjoyed that. And then I noticed they were showing an Irish language movie: the Quiet Girl. By definition, that is not a blockbuster. It got a lot of praise, and the trailer looked interesting. On a whim, I decided to go there. No need to book a ticket! No way this film would be sold out. And it wasn't.

It is a film (trailer here) about a girl from a big, poor, dysfunctional Irish family who gets shipped out to live with a middle-aged couple for a while. In the trailer you don't know it, but in the film you find out that they are relatives, even though she clearly doesn't know them. And from here: spoiler alert.

From the trailer it is already clear that she gets a loving welcome, although initially it only comes from the woman, and not the man. And altogether it is a bit of a cliche; young girl melts the heart of grumpy bloke. Reject finds love in an unexpected place. It is all a bit predictable and cliched in my opinion. And at the end of the movie, the summer is over, and she has to go back home, as that is where she goes to school. And she doesn't want to, of course. How this pans out the film leaves to the imagination.

The symbolism is a bit easy as well. There are cuckoos everywhere, for obvious reasons. And when the girl and the man have a crucial bonding scene sitting on the beach looking at lights in the distance, there are only two lights initially, but by the end of the scene there are three. It didn't have to be so unsubtle for me.

It's still nice to occasionally see an arthouse film, but this one is not going to end up in my top 10. I intend to be going back again soon, for something similarly small scale, but with a much more frivolous tone. Watch this space!