The Quiet Girl
An Cailín Ciúin
Colm Bairéad (2021)
The nine-year-old title character is Cáit (Catherine Clinch). She’s the youngest child of a mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh) who’s expecting again and a father (Michael Patric) fonder of booze and betting than of his family. During her mother’s pregnancy, Cáit is delivered by her father to a County Waterford farm to live with a fifty-something, otherwise childless couple – Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley), a cousin of Cáit’s mother, and Seán (Andrew Bennett). The story is set in 1981 although I didn’t work that out from watching The Quiet Girl, an adaptation by writer-director Colm Bairéad of Claire Keegan’s 2010 novella Foster. The film has garnered unanimously enthusiastic reviews in the British and Irish press. Keegan’s novella was in English but much of the film’s dialogue is in the Irish language. (I wish all of it were, and therefore subtitled: I couldn’t make out some of the English dialogue in the early stages.) This has earned Bairéad cultural heritage brownie points. Sorry to be a spoilsport but I reckon these have translated into excessive praise for a piece of drama that’s engaging but limited and predictable.
Cáit hasn’t been in her new surroundings long before Eibhlín tells her that ‘a house with secrets is a house of shame – you’ll find no secrets in this house’. From this point on, of course, it’s just a matter of time before the secrets of her de facto foster parents are uncovered. Steam trains on Cáit’s bedroom wallpaper are one hefty clue, the tops and trousers that Eibhlín gives the child to wear another. (Cáit’s feckless father has driven off with the suitcase containing his daughter’s clothes still in his car.) Carrie Crowley’s meticulous, overworked playing of Eibhlín – every look, gesture and vocal inflection bespeaks suppressed grief – is a constant reminder of what’s coming. I found waiting for the big reveal distracted from what’s surely meant to be the heart of the film – how Cáit discovers, for the first time in her young life, what it’s like to be looked after by adults who both love and have plenty of time for you.
Details of the tragic backstory eventually arrive in a splurge of information, following a wake that Cáit attends with Eibhlín and Seán. When they need to leave prematurely, another guest, Una (Joan Sheehy), offers to walk the child back to her house: Seán can pick Cáit up there later. The obviously rancid Una has an ulterior motive – she seizes the opportunity to grill Cáit: does Eibhlín use butter or margarine in her pastry, how is her drink problem these days? A telltale as well as a nosey-parker, she also regales Cáit with the story of how Eibhlín and Seán’s young son drowned in a slurry pit on the farm, and his mother’s hair turned white overnight. The little girl’s puzzled insistence that Eibhlín’s hair is brown is met with derision: doesn’t Cáit realise it’s dyed? The moment she gets home, Una is ranting to her aged mother about the shoddy standards of the wake – cheap food, the corpse lying crooked in the coffin with a plastic rosary in his hands.
This overdone episode is certainly different from what’s gone before – the mostly hushed atmosphere of the farmhouse, Kate McCullough’s sunlit images of the lovely rural landscape, Stephen Rennicks’ super-sensitive score. Because there’s not much talking from anyone until Una appears on the scene, Cáit’s supposed reticence isn’t actually that conspicuous. She’s instantly chatty with Seán when he shows her round the farm – a sequence in which Seán too is suddenly no longer taciturn. Later on, he says to someone who comments on how quiet Cáit is that she ‘says what she needs to say’ (and commends keeping your own counsel as a general principle). The scenes between Cáit and Seán are the strongest part of The Quiet Girl. Skilfully directed by Colm Bairéad, Catherine Clinch is very good in the lead role and Andrew Bennett gives much the best performance among the adult actors. Seán loves Eibhlín (and she him) but the weight of her sadness is a heavy burden: it makes emotional sense that he opens up when she’s not on the scene, and he and Cáit are on their own. Besides, a compassionate father is what the child most clearly needs.
The unsurprising dramatic climax sees Cáit fall into the slurry pit but she survives and the chill she catches doesn’t, thank goodness, prove fatal. After her mother’s baby is born, Cáit returns to her parents. It’s a cliché that, as Eibhlín and Seán drive away, she runs after their car but the closing moments of The Quiet Girl are powerful. Seán stops the car at a toll gate and gets out to see Cáit approaching. In the closing shots, they hug each other but Cáit’s father is marching towards them, ready to reclaim her.
19 May 2022