Peter Mackie Burns (2019)

Colm (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor) is a Dubliner in his mid-forties – married, two kids, a white-collar worker at the city docks.  Rialto begins shortly after his father’s death.  Ten minutes later, Colm nervously accepts the offer of a quick fumble in a gents’ toilet with Jay (Tom Glynn-Carney), a nineteen-year-old rent boy who subsequently blackmails him.  The firm Colm has worked for since leaving school has recently been taken over by an overseas company; at around the half-hour mark of the film, Colm is told he’s been made redundant.  It never rains but it pours.

This is Peter Mackie Burns’s second feature (following the well-received Daphne (2017), which I’ve not seen).  It’s finely made and acted but excessively bleak – the rapid succession of key unhappy events is what renders the bleakness excessive.  Despite being alarmed by their first encounter and its aftermath, Colm not only seeks Jay out again but falls in love with him.  When he learns he’s losing his job Colm heads for his wife’s workplace but she’s out of the office on her lunch hour.  He tells his bad news to Jay instead, in the B&B room that Colm books for the afternoon.  While his feelings for Jay are intensifying and relations with his wife, Claire (Monica Dolan), and the couple’s teenage son, Shane (Scott Graham), worsen, Colm is also preparing for his father’s memorial service.  The service is delayed until late in the film, in order to trigger Colm’s climactic collapse and, in the meantime, get some mileage out of the revelation that the father inflicted physical and emotional abuse on his family.  That’s a problem with Rialto:  Colm’s one-after-another misfortunes and falling apart are dictated by plotting requirements rather than psychologically convincing.

The sliding strings in Valentin Hadjadj’s score suggest a life slithering out of control but this would be a stronger film if the main character’s world turned upside down in a more extended timeframe[1].  That would have allowed  Burns to create a better picture of this world before it was destabilised.  Since he’s in extremis virtually from the start there’s nothing to show what Colm was like until his father exited his life and Jay entered it.  Loving, sensitive Claire knows something’s wrong with her husband but not what, except that he tends to drink too much.  She wants to know and is exasperated that he won’t let her share his pain.  (Some reviews of the film take it as read that Colm has been knocked sideways by his father’s death but if that were the case, or Claire believed it might be, why would she be mystified by Colm’s mute misery?)   Shane, the younger child, treats his father with rude contempt.  The only suggestions of a hitherto happy family come in scraps of good-humoured conversation between Colm and his daughter, Kerry (Sophie Jo Wasson).

Equally unclear is how Colm has struggled with divided sexual feelings before meeting Jay.  It works well that each of them can be described as a family man.  Jay has a girlfriend and a baby daughter, though he doesn’t live with them.  His blackmailing demand is a one-off but his attitude towards Colm remains, for a while, acridly hostile.  As for the older man, at first it’s enough for him to pay just to watch the younger one undress or masturbate.  When Colm, as well as becoming more affectionate, asks to be penetrated, Jay thaws somewhat:  he recognises Colm has more than physical feelings for him.  That in itself makes Jay uncomfortable, though, and there’s only one way the film’s central relationship can go.  For Jay, offering sexual services to men is a source of much-needed income to help support his child.  He doesn’t want love with or from another man.  Whether Colm’s obsession with Jay is (strangely) unprecedented or his latest gay attachment, it’s bound to end in tears, and reinforce the unrelieved gloom of Rialto.

You wouldn’t guess from the look and movement of the film that it’s based on a stage play.  Burns and his cinematographer, Adam Scarth, root the story thoroughly in a variety of Dublin locations that seem integral to the action.  Shots of the protagonist through windows and in cramped rooms are an effective if obvious way of suggesting a man who’s trapped.  More distinctive are images of Colm haring down a shopping mall escalator as he makes his escape from Jay and the gents’ or, later, yelling (silently) from the platform of a crane overlooking the docks.  Most impressive, though, is how Rialto builds a sense of the places where Colm has spent his life – the docks, his and Claire’s pleasant suburban house, the terraced streets of the area Colm grew up in and where his mother (Ger Ryan) still lives.

The film is named not for the Venice original, a cinema or bingo hall but for the actual area of Dublin, in the city’s inner suburbs, that Colm hails from.  The title clearly has a double meaning.  Mark O’Halloran’s screenplay is adapted from his stage two-hander, Trade.  The island of Rialto contained the mercantile quarter of medieval Venice and the word rialto can still mean a marketplace.  Jay is a trader, whose dealings with Colm are for business not pleasure.  The dual significance of the title in Roman Polanski’s Chinatown – a key location in the action that also refers to a state of mind, reflecting the place’s past associations for the protagonist – has cast a long shadow.  In Colm’s case, however, his Rialto childhood doesn’t seem dramatically relevant to who he’s become.  He’s determined, he tells Jay, to be ‘a good person’ – unlike his abusive father.  Yet it’s hard to see how the latter has otherwise influenced his son’s psyche.

It’s also hard to fault Peter Mackie Burns’s handling of his cast.  As Claire, Monica Dolan, needless to say, is emotionally precise and piercing.  Tom Glynn-Carney’s Jay has the look of a delinquent choirboy but this young actor (in 2017 he was Mark Rylance’s son in Dunkirk and, on stage, an IRA killer in Jez Butterworth’s The Ferryman) develops Jay’s increasingly uneasy feelings subtly and well.  Tom Vaughan-Lawlor’s stricken face occasionally brings Alec McCowen’s to mind:  Vaughan-Lawlor’s eyes express an upsetting capacity for feeling hurt.  At the same time, he makes Colm convincingly unremarkable.  It’s easy to believe that people at work – his blue-collar colleague Noel (Michael Smiley), the HR person (Eileen Walsh) who tells him his job will disappear – wouldn’t easily spot there was something wrong with Colm.  Tom Vaughan-Lawlor thus gives him a real capacity to surprise.  Shortly before the end of the film, Colm tells Shane about Jay and sex with Jay.  It’s a doubly startling moment – for the viewer, as well as for Shane.  He’s the last family member in whom you’d expect Colm to confide.  In doing so, he makes clear that he loves Jay more than he loves his son.

Mark O’Halloran wrote the screenplays for Lenny Abrahamson’s first two films, Adam and Paul (2004) and Garage (2007).  O’Halloran is also an actor (he played one of the drug-addict title characters in Adam and Paul and was striking in Shane Meadows’s The Virtues on television last year); and he knows how to write for actors – the dialogue in Rialto is pithy and believable.  The film literally makes a drama out of a crisis.  Although its opacity around the roots of the crisis is frustrating, this is an absorbing drama – and a painful one, even as you resist the surfeit of agony.  Claire, driven to distraction by what’s happening with Colm, has to get away from the house.  In the closing scene, her husband, post-Jay, is alone there, clearing debris in the garden.  He hears someone come in at the front door.  We don’t see who.  If it’s his returning wife, where does Colm start in telling her what’s been going on?

25 October 2020

[1] I watched the film under the misapprehension that Colm was preparing for his father’s funeral.  Although that exaggerated my sense that major upheavals were happening too quickly, the Sight & Sound (November 2020) review and plot synopsis suggest it’s less than clear how much time is passing in Rialto.  The synopsis refers to the service for the father as a ‘”month’s mind” mass’.  (According to Wikipedia, this is ‘a requiem mass celebrated about one month after a person’s death, in memory of the deceased’.)  The plot summary accompanies a review by Kate Stables which introduces Colm as ‘a Dublin dock manager gutting his world within a week’.