Tenderness and charm

Press, 24 February 1986, Page 14

Tenderness and charm

THE COUNTRY GIRLS Directed by Desmond Davis. Screenplay by Edna O’Brien. The Country Girls is a labour of love about lost love; a tender film of growing up in Ireland in the 19505. Edna O’Brien has adapted her autobiographical novel with care. In the director, Desmond Davis, she knew she had someone she could trust to portray a part of her life. Davis had directed the book’s sequel, “The Green Eyes” (also scripted by O’Brien), 20 years earlier. “My job," he said of “The Country Girls,” “was to film Edna’s book with as much feeling and poetry as there is in the writing — to convey the quality of the book without being literary. Visually, therefore, the pictures are beautifully composed and well set, but without complexity.”

The result is indeed ravishing, and while it may not be complex in appearance, it could not have been easy. “Natural” requires hard work and meticulous attention to detail. The magic of “The Country Girls” is that

none of the sweat shows. Davis waits for the light, and captures the Irish countryside in soft water-colours: emerald fields, leaden skies and rain-washed stone. Indoors, he frames faces by . fire or windowlight; marvellous Celtic faces puffed by a chill — or the tot to ward it off.

The ? cast is exclusively Irish save for Sam Neill’s role of Mr Gentleman, but then Neill was born in Armagh.

Maeve Germaine (Kate) and Jill Doyle (Baba) reward the decision to cast young, unknown actresses in the leads. Their performances as the mismatched friends are excellent. Baba, bubbling and restless, leads the studious Kate into one scrape after another through their adolescence, but the two are devoted.

Davis makes good use of close-ups in the emotional scenes. Kate is about to enjoy an evening at the theatre when she is told that her mother has drowned. The camera cuts back and forward to distraught faces, except for the mute expression of a stage Dracula waiting to go on. He is the accidental audience to a real-life

tragedy. z It is this sort of quirky intuition which gives the film its veracity. Kate and Baba pass through forbidding convent portals to complete their schooling. The food is inedible, the discipline severe, but, this being Ireland, the humour is never far away. Good, virtuous girls always dress and undress beneath their gowns, declares the “warder” nun. So twice a day the pupils gyrate in a sanctimonious watusi to get in and out of their clothes. Edna O'Brien is unforgiving of her convent experience. Her nuns, photographed from low, look like swarthy haggards waiting to pounce on the jaunty spirits of their charges. Baba’s mischevious nature will not be “purified." Kate, as always, owes her first allegiance to her friend. The two binge on communal wine and are strapped for it, but a bawdy poem passed in church is the final outrage and they are expelled. The girls, now young women, are packed off to Dublin and a working life. Kate’s long-time admirer,

Mr Gentleman, who has stalked her since puberty, seizes the chance to consummate his passion.

Neill was never better as this suave, sad seducer. There is an evil edge to his cherubic good looks, but here his Mr Gentleman is not so much cynical as despairing of a loveless marriage. “How is your wife?” Kate asks at their first clandestine lunch. He seems genuinely hurt at the realisation of her~innocence as much as anything. Of course, it cannot end happily, but at least the epilogue is a new beginning. Baba, rebounding from a pregnancy scare, and a resigned Kate board a boat for England. “I always knew it was too beautiful to last," she says of Mr Gentleman ... but she might have meant her childhood, or even Ireland itself.

Ironically, “The Country Girls” was made by an English company, London Films. (Perhaps that detachment helps in the; perspective.) No matter, there is enough Irish charm here to beguile the hardest Fenian heart. — 808 IRVINE