‘The Quiet Girl’ Review: Colm Bairead’s Irish Oscar Entry
14.12.2022 - 19:25
/ deadline.com
Why do we have children? Cait’s Mam and Da would be hard-pressed to answer that, with a house full of sour teenage daughters, a toddler barely walking, another baby about to land and not enough money to pay a day laborer to bring in the hay. These are the kind of kids who go to school with no lunch.
With The Quiet Girl, Ireland’s entry for the Best International Feature Oscar, we are apparently in the late 1960s. As her family’s middle child, Cait (Catherine Clinch) has learned to be silently wary, lowering her eyes as she walks by the school bullies and fading into the back seat of her father’s car when he picks up his fancy woman in the middle of nowhere on a country road, snickering with her as they drive along with no one to see them. No one who counts, that is.
When Cait is sent to stay with her mother’s cousin Eibhlin (Carrie Crowley) on the far coast of Ireland for the summer, she wears her usual set expression of endurance; her dilapidated family has surely just found one more way to neglect her. She has no more idea what to do with Eibhlin Kinsella’s kindness than she does with a hot bath: both are outside her experience. Which of these treats is she allowed to talk about? There are no secrets in this house, Eibhlin tells her. If there are secrets in a house, there is shame. She wants no shame in her house.
But there are other kinds of secrecy: a sorrow that is simply too great to be spoken, for example. Arriving with only the cotton dress she is wearing, Cait wears the child’s trousers and jumpers already in the wardrobe of her room. The clothes of a boy, never mentioned. Then Eibhlin’s husband Sean (Andrew Bennett), gruff and initially clearly reluctant to take on this strange, silent girl, says she can’t
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