Old Yorker

  • Daughters of the Dust

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Julie Dash (1991)

    Born in New York City in 1952, Julie Dash has Gullah ancestors on her father’s side.  The Gullah (according to Wikipedia) ‘are African Americans who live in the Lowcountry region of the US states of Georgia, Florida, South Carolina and North Carolina, in both the coastal plain and the Sea Islands.  They have developed a creole language, also called Gullah, and a culture with significant African influence’.  Daughters of the Dust, set half a century before the year of its writer-director’s birth, describes a Gullah family gathering immediately before most of its members set out from the Sea Islands of South Carolina for the American mainland.  The film’s place in cinema history is assured:  it was the first feature directed by an African-American woman to receive a general theatrical release in the US.

    This cachet could earn Daughters of the Dust a place in Sight & Sound’s upcoming decennial greatest films poll – a selection that, as recent issues of the magazine have made clear, is under pressure to be a lot more diverse than hitherto[1].  S&S has already devoted too many column inches to this year’s list-fest:  I’ve had enough of the poll even before it happens.  One reference to it on the letters page in the latest S&S (June 2022) is germane to Dash’s film, though.  Kelly May writes that ‘I for one would be pleased see voters using their hearts over their heads.  Cinema should be about visceral, emotional reactions …’   I’ve never understood why the don’t-think-it-feel-it argument should apply to a film any more than to a play or a poem or a painting – why not think and feel?  But Daughters of the Dust, which I’d never seen before, often left me wishing I could change the habits of a lifetime.

    A few members of the Peazant family have made the journey to the mainland before, and the cultural transition it entails.  They’re returning to their native island for the leave-taking before heading back north for good, with others.  Viola Peazant (Cheryl Lynn Bruce), who now resides in Philadelphia, is a devout Christian.  She’s accompanied by Mr Snead (Tommy Hicks), a photographer who’ll take pictures of the farewell ceremonies, including a family last supper.  The controversial Yellow Mary (Barbara-O) comes back with her younger same-sex lover (Trula Hoosier).  Those preparing to leave for the first time include Haagar Peazant (Kaycee Moore), who seems to have appointed herself leader of the migrating party; Eli Peazant (Adisa Anderson), conflicted as to whether to stay or go; his wife Eula (Alva Rogers), who is pregnant with the child of a white man who raped her; and Bilal Muhammad (Umar Abdurrahman), a Muslim and pillar of the island community.  Those who’ll remain on the island include Nana Peazant (Cora Lee Day), the elderly family matriarch and chief embodiment of its African ancestry and traditions.

    The cinematography is by Arthur Jafa (Julie Dash’s ex-husband).  As a succession of images, Daughters in the Dust, shot on location on St Helena Island and Hunting Island off the South Carolina coast, is beguiling – the various single and groups of figures in the seascape, a large, battered parasol washed up on the beach.  When the film talks, however, it’s usually exasperating.  The last entry in the opening credits cast list (which caused me some apprehension) is ‘Kay-Lynn Warren as the Unborn Child’.  The spirit of Eula’s unborn child, this character both narrates the film and, supernaturally, appears as a young girl.  She does both intermittently and, in the case of the narration, incomprehensibly.  This is a family failing.  You know where you are when Viola and Snead talk, and, in a manner of speaking – which Cora Lee Day certainly has, along with a camera-magnetising face – when Nana delivers pronouncements like:

    ‘I am the first and the last.  I am the honoured one and the scorned one.  I am the whore and the holy one.  I am the wife and the virgin.  I am the barren one and many are my daughters.  I am the silence that you cannot understand.  I am the utterance of my name.’

    It’s hard to know if this kind of language is typical of the film – I couldn’t make out what most of the others were saying.

    I recognised only one member of the cast, Tommy Redmond Hicks, from Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It (1986).  I thought I recognised Adisa Anderson but his very brief list of credits on IMDb suggests I was confusing him with someone else.  The film boasts some impressive physical acting, from Anderson especially, but this rarely adds up to coherent characterisation.  The most conventionally accomplished performance comes from Cheryl Lynn Bruce.  Writing about Daughters of the Dust in Sight & Sound in 2017 (when the restored film was re-released), Lizzie Francke described it as ‘balletic, operatic cinema’.  That’s right enough and the film (therefore) left me wondering why the people on the screen seemed to keep repeating their movements and the attitudes they presented.  Daughters of the Dust is a culturally important piece of cinema.  Unless you can stop yourself wondering what exactly the dramatis personae are doing and why they’re doing it, and trying to work out most of the relationships, the film is also hard work.

    20 May 2022

    [1] Afternote:  Daughters of the Dust duly made into the hallowed top hundred announced on 1 December 2022 – joint 60th, alongside La dolce vita and Moonlight …

  • The Quiet Girl

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

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