2023-11-19 18:21:45
Kultur „The Quiet Girl“
This is the Irish Oscar candidate
Status: 19.11.2023 | Reading time: 3 minutes
Catherine Clinch is the quiet girl
Source: New Visions
Colm Bairéad’s debut film The Quiet Girl is the first Irish film ever nominated for an Oscar. It is the story of the new birth of a girl who experiences security and care for the first time. “The Quiet Girl” also exposes a number of ethical clichés.
There is currently a lot of talk about the inner child that needs to find a home, as in the title of Stefanie Stahl’s book that has become proverbial. In general, there’s a lot of talking and loud talk, and that’s why “The Quiet Girl”, set in Ireland in the early 1980s, hits the mark twice as much.
Because in Colm Bairéad’s feature film debut, a child finds security for the first time. And it experiences people who understand silence as a warmly illuminated space in which everything has its place: love, trust. And the greatest pain of all.
“So many have missed the opportunity to remain silent and have lost a great deal because of it,” is one of the few sentences that can be heard, in the Irish language, soft and bitter and dark. The rehabilitation of silence is not the only objection to common narrative patterns and ethical clichés. The film also subverts the film’s myth that someone just has to find their biological parents and everything will be great.
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The “quiet girl” is nine-year-old Cáit (Catherine Clinch). Because her own family is poor, indifferent and overwhelmed, the child has withdrawn into herself. In the first, minimalist sequence it even appears to be dead; all you see is a bundle of dirty textiles in the tall grass, barely recognizable as a human being. But Cáit will stand up.
The entire film, shot in a narrow 1.37:1 format based on a short story by Claire Keegan, is structured like the story of a new birth. Initially, confinement, dirt and gloom fill the cropped images. There is no outside. Not even the vastness of the gray-green landscape guarantees enough air to breathe.
But then a door opens and everything flows in warm gold and green. But without, and this must be emphasized given the cheesy German trailer, slipping into sentimentality. The girl is sent to relatives on the other side of Ireland for a summer.
No word is necessary
Eibhlín Cinnsealach and her husband Seán (Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett), childless farmers, have worked hard to achieve modest prosperity. A long-unused children’s room with locomotive wallpaper hints at the pain that underlies this otherwise friendly home.
Such “secrets” (a key word in the film) are not spread out at the dialogue level or even explained off-screen, but are told visually with a few, calm details. No word is necessary to show that Cáit is experiencing care for the first time, even if it is a cookie that the foster father places on the child’s table as an apology.
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As passive as it seems to be in the face of all this, its limited perspective dominates the film. But it is precisely because of this that the images evoke something that resembles universal, fragmentary memories.
Childhood is not just “boyhood”. The fact that films like “Petite Maman”, “Tótem” and now the Oscar-nominated “The Quiet Girl” talk about people as little girls is a reminder that there is, or once was, a mode of experience that doesn’t want to know anything about gender attributions. But first you have to figure out what that is: trust, love. Pain.
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