The Quiet Girl

‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’ 

The beautiful film (I almost want to pronounce it "filum" like the Irish are wont) The Quiet Girl, that was made by Colm Bairéad from Claire Keegan's short novel Foster suffers from the same affliction endured by most film adaptations of finer literary works. It enlarges the most intimate dimensions of the book, told from the perspective of Cáit, a 9-year-old girl, like it feels obliged to open everything up for the Big Screen so everyone can see it in all its tiniest details. Technically, it's a kind of showing off - one medium exulting in externals in the same way another medium exults on the internals. But there is also a misplaced need to always explain, to make explicit what is implicit. Too many filmmakers are afraid that some viewers who are less attentive won't get whatever they're getting at. They need to get over this fear. 

The little book, published as a stand alone novella, has reminded some critics of Chekhov, who also avoided the longer form. Published in 2010 but set in Counties Wexford and Wicklow in 1981, Foster is a remarkably sweet and delicate story of a girl sent by her mother to live for a summer with a couple that has no child so that the mother can get on with bearing her sixth child. The summer becomes such a respite in the girl's life that she (quietly) dreads having to leave and go back to a houseful that overwhelmed her before and is likely to be worse with the addition of one more. 

The film, shot in County Meath, quickly establishes Cáit's isolation within her large family. We first see her lying in a meadow as voices call out to her. When we notice her lying there, obscured by the bushes, her stillness and the voices calling her name are a little alarming. She gets up and goes back to the house. Her family isn't exactly poor - they live in a two-storey farmhouse. But her parents don't appear to be up to the challenges of their life. Cáit's father is younger than he seemed in the story, and also much cruder. He drinks, chain smokes and dallies with other women. The mother is reduced to a baby-making drudge. 

The little cruelties that children in large families endure don't have to be shown to us. We each have an innate sense of them, almost beyond memory. Cáit's family is never overtly abusive. When she hides under her bed rather than face her mother's reaction to her having wet the bed the night before, her mother, knowing she's there, sourly tells her she has "muck" on her shoes. Clearly, the worst she has to endure from her family, as the youngest of four daughters, is total neglect. 

The foster couple she is sent to live with, Sean and Evelyn Kinsella, are materially better off than the girl's family, but not by much. The difference is that their house seems so much larger and finer with just the two of them. Sean runs a dairy farm, and though Cáit isn't required to work, she helps Sean with the sweeping and learns how to feed the calves from a bottle, since the cows' milk is for sale. 

Immediately upon her father's departure, without so much as a goodbye hug (and driving off with her suitcase), Cáit is given the most luxurious bath of her life by Evelyn, all the way down to scrubbing her toes. Evelyn tells her there are no secrets in the house, but she neglects to tell her that they had a son who chased the dog into a slurry pit and drowned. Cáit doesn't learn about it until a nosy neighbor woman tells her. 

The Quiet Girl is Irish in more than just its setting. The spoken language is almost all Irish, an ancient Gaelic language. And the dialogue occasionally switches to English words at the oddest moments. Interestingly, Cáit's father is the only character in the film to speak exclusively in English, which further isolates him from everyone around him. 

It's a very quiet film, using Stephen Rennicks's music so sparingly it's almost unnoticeable - which, I have found, is the best film music. I can't honestly tell if the wondrous quality of the cinematography, by Kate McCullough, is due to the beauty of the country or not. But it doesn't matter. There are three principal actors, Carrie Crowley as Evelyn Kinsella, Andrew Bennett as Sean, and a newcomer, Catherine Clinch as Cáit. Clinch is never called upon to act, but she manages to suggest with her deep blue eyes alone such a range of reactions, and always so subtly, that it draws the viewer closer to her and into the world in which she breathes. 

When, sadly, Cáit must return to her home and get ready for the new school year, the Kinsellas are left childless as before. The only benefit is Caít's experience of genuine familial love. The film’s final scene is overwhelmingly beautiful. 

There are missteps. When the girl runs to the mailbox and back and in the closing scene, the film switches to slow-motion. It's a common enough device. In this case I would guess it's the filmmaker's way of italicizing the moment, stretching time to make the moment last. In Claire Keegan's story, the girl says, 

My heart does not so much feel that it is in my chest as in my hands, and that I am carrying it along swiftly, as though I have become the messenger for what is going on inside of me. 

But the switch is jarring in The Quiet Girl, knocking us into the unreal. Not as egregious as the moment Forrest Gump starts to run, kicking off his leg braces. But that was a bad movie, and this is a good one.* 

*I can't condemn the use of slow motion entirely. A friend reminded me of Sam Peckinpah's use of slow motion, which was often fascinating. So there is a creative way to use the special effect.