The Quiet Girl, Ireland’s entry to this year’s International Oscar, is the kind of film you watch with a knot in your throat, knowing its gentle beauty and suggestive foreshadowing may give way to sadness, if not outright tragedy, compounded by the unalterable reality of its setting. This time and place – early 1980s rural Ireland – would seemingly have it no other way.
Though it is near impossible not to cry during this film’s final scene, somehow, wondrously, The Quiet Girl (An Cailín Ciúin) doesn’t leave you with a sense of sadness, but rather a feeling of the hope and potential of a child well loved. And that’s the singularity of the tale, based on a short story by Claire Keegan, which captures how one summer in a child’s life, and the meticulous care she’s shown for the first time ever by distant relatives, may well change the course of her life – and her relatives’ as well.
Comments