While it's clear times were in no way easier - Cait's mother is popping out babies with very little control over when and how many, they've no money and what little they do have, Cait's philandering father is spending at the pub - it does feel like a simpler time, a time when a child is perfectly happy to entertain themselves by lying in an overgrown wheat field gazing at the grain.
Although it's in the title, I'm not sure that Cait really is a quiet girl, just a girl lacking the opportunity to be heard. She answers every question asked of her by the unfamiliar adults she's put in the care of, which is something my own children would struggle to do. But it's without doubt a quiet film, which is what gives it its charm. It's a moving study of a childless couple and a girl - whose family is too big and under too much stress to give her any care or attention - giving each other something all three desperately crave: the opportunity to nurture and be nurtured.
The layers to the story reveal themselves slowly over the course of the film, so quietly that a single event towards the end leaves your heart in your throat in a way it wouldn't have had the film been more action-driven up to that point. Bilingual film-maker Colm Bairead, who premiered the film at the Berlinale early this year, has avoided many of the pitfalls of first-time directors by keeping the story simple and contained.
The film did momentarily inflict some mother guilt on me, making me wonder whether my children, like Cait, are suffering from an inability to express themselves fully due to being part of a brood. But then they all yelled at me and I was reminded that not a single complaint has gone unuttered these school holidays. There are no quiet girls or boys in this house.
HE SAW
We open on the protagonist, Cait, lying in long grass while someone repeatedly shouts her name. When she finally comes inside, she hides under her bed. We later see her not having enough to eat, being called names by other kids and running away from school.
We don't know much about her family, except that they're poor and that she has a lot of siblings, who all go quiet when the dad walks into the room, and that the mum is pregnant. It becomes clear the other kids at school think Cait is weird and she hates it there. From her behaviour, we deduce that she's not having a good time at home either, and we accumulate some evidence in support of the proposition that her dad's an a-hole. Things really kick off when her mum gets a letter and next thing she's in the car with her dad, going on a long trip to we know not where, nor what for. Even when she gets there, we don't really know what's going on or why, and it takes a long time before we figure it all out.
Not much happens in the movie, by which I mean there's little action or dialogue, and few plot complications. This is striking, given how compelling it is to watch. It creates much of its power by withholding, like a good short story, and at least some of the reason for that is that it's based on one: Foster, by Irish writer Claire Keegan. The director read it a few years back, in tears, and couldn't believe his luck when he discovered no one had bought the film rights.
In a world in which we can find instant answers to anything, this movie offers us few, and those it does are typically ambiguous. This is its great appeal - that it treats us as intelligent viewers - which is why it was a bit confusing when it reached its end and confronted us with an emotionally manipulative montage, recapping for us many of its protagonist's experiences, as if we might have forgotten them over the not many minutes since we last saw them. It was a bit clunky but not enough to ruin the experience. The Quiet Girl is the most beautiful movie I've seen this year.
The Quiet Girl is in cinemas now.
