Like Home and Away on crack: will Aussies bristle at toxic beach Ockers?
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic."
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic."
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
"I hope everyone has tough enough skin to know that it's only a bit of craic."
Irish director Lorcan Finnegan smiles as he ponders the possibility that Australians will baulk, and maybe even bristle, at his unflattering depiction of tribal and toxic Ocker Aussies in his trippy psychological thriller The Surfer starring Nicolas Cage.
Filmed in Yallingup, the home of surf champ Taj Burrow near Busselton in Western Australia, The Surfer sets Cage on a sun-baked slow boil as a returning expat who's made an offer on a big house overlooking the idyllic beach where he grew up.
He dreams that coming home to Luna Bay will bring him closer to his son and maybe save his marriage.
But the thuggish gang of local surfers here won't let "outsiders" like him ride the waves, so bonding with his boy on their surfboards isn't looking likely. "Locals only", the beach signs warn.
"Don't live here, don't surf here" the menacing Bay Boys growl to his face.
But as the abuse of the louts escalates - beating him up, stealing his surfboard, vandalising his Lexus - Cage, desperately driven by ego, alienation and an aching sense of nostalgia, won't let it go and sets up camp in the carpark above the beach.
It's a sweaty, chafing, dementedly macho scenario of sometimes surreal savagery cooked up with fiendish glee by Finnegan and scriptwriter (and fellow Irishman) Thomas Martin to push Cage to breaking point.
As the hallucinogenic effects of blistering sun and extreme heat and the humiliations meted out by alpha male Julian McMahon's cult of bogan bullies pile up, he loses his fancy watch, his phone charger, his shoes and, inevitably, his mind.
Those strange distortions staring back at him in the metal mirror in the carpark toilet block begin to feel frighteningly real.
Partially inspired by the aggressively territorial Lunada Bay Boys, a surf gang that notoriously claimed a stretch of Californian coast as their own, the film's more recognisable reference is a retro B-movie visual style and gonzo tone that evokes Australian New Wave films of the 1970s. Think Wake in Fright (1971), The Last Wave (1977) and Long Weekend (1978).
Finnegan calls The Surfer's vibe "strange and dreamy" but there's a riptide of horror running through the cinematography of Radek Ladczuk (The Babadook, The Nightingale) and the eerily off-kilter score by Franois Tétaz (Wolf Creek).
Wake In Fright, Ted Kotcheff's skin-crawling portrait of an ugly Australia (notorious for its kangaroo hunt sequence and notable for being Chips Rafferty's final film and Jack Thompson's first), is an unmistakable influence. With its own animalistic grotesquery, The Surfer plays like Wake in Fright in wetsuits.
"When I started filmmaking, Australian New Wave and Ozploitation films were a massive inspiration," Finnegan says. "My very first film Without Name was inspired by Picnic At Hanging Rock, the Peter Weir film, and Colin Eggleston's Long Weekend.
"So for this film, yeah, we were watching a lot of Wake in Fright and also Nicolas Roeg's Walkabout. Those films have the tradition of the outsider. Not only the outsider as a character, but the outsider as the filmmaker going to Australia and making a very Australian film - with Nic Roeg being British and Ted Kotcheff being Canadian."
But Finnegan insists he didn't set out to hold up a warped public toilet mirror to Australians.
"This isn't a critique of Australia," he says.
"It's about a very specific group of people on this beach. To me, these guys are almost part of the Jungian journey that Nic Cage's character has to go on ... they are representative of some sort of shadow self within him. What he believes he wants at the beginning of the film is just this materialist goal of owning this house and that will fix all of his problems and his relationships. They have to be mean to him because, as they say, before you can surf you must suffer. To me these characters are almost caricatures [and] ... poking fun at that sort of hypermasculinity and the male ego in crisis."
Cage, the Oscar-winner for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas who relished playing a version of his kooky self in 2022's The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, leans hard into The Surfer's Kafkaesque absurdity.
The film's ending comes without his character exacting the ultimate revenge we might have expected and without one of those head-bursts-into-Ghost Rider-flames explosions of Cage rage that have become the actor's trademark.
But, like Wake in Fright's outsider driven to madness by the locals, Cage takes his descent into some very unsavoury places.
At one point in his disintegration into delirium he flirts with eating a dead rat, then he uses it as a weapon (Look out for the line "Eat the rat!" coming to a Cage meme near you). There's also a scene involving a nest of bird eggs that takes you all the way back to 1989 and his cockroach-eating scene in Vampire's Kiss.
Like Walkabout, Finnegan lays on deliberately discomforting cutaway close-ups to cackling kookaburras, shrieking cicadas and echidnas clawing at the earth. The flies - drawn to Cage's sunburn and sweat make-up ("there was a lot of fake sweat") - were an authentic bonus.
"We were just lucky with the flies," he laughs. "I thought we were lucky. I don't think the actors thought that."
Like many in Ireland and the UK, the filmmaker (whose previous films include Jesse Eisenberg sci-fi horror Vivarium and Eva Green thriller Nocebo) grew up with sunshine-filled Aussie soaps like Home & Away and Neighbours.
He seems to relish the suggestion his pulpy psychodrama flips that image on its ugly edge and plays like Home & Away on crack.
"Yes, the score for the film by Franois Tetaz, for the scene where Nic is walking around drinking out of puddles and eating bird eggs, has a piece of music called Clam's Casino that actually has flavours of Skippy in it."
What's that, Skip? The outsiders have stolen your banjo-and-harmonica innocence and turned it into a demented riff on dinkum tribalism? Tsk tsk!
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Truman Capote wrote, "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." In this film, God seems to be playing with that idea, toying with people's hopes and dreams and lives, giving them inspiration that leads to suffering, and granting at least some wishes but with a twist or a capricious sense of timing. Or maybe it's all down to some other kind of supernatural goings-on, or to fate. Or, if you're not into such metaphysical speculations, maybe things like coincidence just happen. This Irish romantic drama takes its sweet time to unfold and then crams a lot towards the end in a rush that hinders, rather than enhances, its impact. We have to wait a long time before the young lovers even meet, and even longer to discover what the title means. Niall Williams adapted his own novel: it's his first movie script, and the task might have been better entrusted to a screenwriter with more experience and objectivity. Four Letters of Love is also full of cliches from the Emerald Isle and from movies set there. Dancing merry jigs to jolly songs? Tick. A stern Mother Superior at a drab Catholic girls' boarding school? Tick. Impractical husbands and longsuffering wives? A score featuring wordless, ethereal female vocals? To be sure, to be sure. There are no banshees, but there do appear to be ghosts. There's also some spectacular scenery, gorgeously shot by Damien Elliott. The story begins in the 1970s. One day at the office, civil servant William Coughlin (Pierce Brosnan) has an epiphany and chucks in his job to become a painter. He abruptly leaves his wife Bette (Imelda May) and son Nicholas (Fionn O'Shea) to head west, leaving them bewildered and poor: Bette never recovers from the shock, and William comes and goes as he pleases. Meanwhile, on the island where William goes to paint, Isabel (Ann Skelly) is helping to care for her brother Sean (Donal Finn), who's wheelchair-bound and mute after a stroke. Isabel's parents - schoolteacher Muiris (Gabriel Byrne) and mother Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) - send her off to a boarding school but she runs away and takes up with Peadar (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a musician with a car. He's an underdeveloped character, essentially a plot contrivance to complicate things between Nicholas and Isabel, but he's not a cardboard cad. Williams and experienced director Polly Steele (Let Me Go) do a fair job of juggling the moves between time and place but sometimes important elements - like a painting by William that plays a crucial role - aren't dealt with as clearly or skilfully as they should be. As mentioned, it takes a long time for Nicholas and Isabel to meet, after a near miss or two, and their falling in love feels rather too rushed and underplayed. Not that the full gushing Hollywood treatment was needed but the handling seems clumsy. The way Nicholas is kept around for story purposes isn't entirely convincing either. There's an air of muted fatalism about things: people don't seem to get too passionate or upset. The film benefits from a fine cast. O'Shea was very likeable in the heartwarming boarding-school drama Handsome Devil (in which he starred with Nicholas Galitzine) and, playing a fairly subdued character here, is a sympathetic hero throughout. Skelly is also very good: you hope things will end well for them. Brosnan seems slightly odd casting as a scruffy bohemian but he and the other veterans are good to have around. Romantic dramas can end happily or tragically, hopefully or bittersweetly: without spoiling the film, the ending doesn't seem entirely clear, which is a little frustrating. But the painting, when finally viewed, does have some impact. It, like the film, could have had more. Truman Capote wrote, "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." In this film, God seems to be playing with that idea, toying with people's hopes and dreams and lives, giving them inspiration that leads to suffering, and granting at least some wishes but with a twist or a capricious sense of timing. Or maybe it's all down to some other kind of supernatural goings-on, or to fate. Or, if you're not into such metaphysical speculations, maybe things like coincidence just happen. This Irish romantic drama takes its sweet time to unfold and then crams a lot towards the end in a rush that hinders, rather than enhances, its impact. We have to wait a long time before the young lovers even meet, and even longer to discover what the title means. Niall Williams adapted his own novel: it's his first movie script, and the task might have been better entrusted to a screenwriter with more experience and objectivity. Four Letters of Love is also full of cliches from the Emerald Isle and from movies set there. Dancing merry jigs to jolly songs? Tick. A stern Mother Superior at a drab Catholic girls' boarding school? Tick. Impractical husbands and longsuffering wives? A score featuring wordless, ethereal female vocals? To be sure, to be sure. There are no banshees, but there do appear to be ghosts. There's also some spectacular scenery, gorgeously shot by Damien Elliott. The story begins in the 1970s. One day at the office, civil servant William Coughlin (Pierce Brosnan) has an epiphany and chucks in his job to become a painter. He abruptly leaves his wife Bette (Imelda May) and son Nicholas (Fionn O'Shea) to head west, leaving them bewildered and poor: Bette never recovers from the shock, and William comes and goes as he pleases. Meanwhile, on the island where William goes to paint, Isabel (Ann Skelly) is helping to care for her brother Sean (Donal Finn), who's wheelchair-bound and mute after a stroke. Isabel's parents - schoolteacher Muiris (Gabriel Byrne) and mother Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) - send her off to a boarding school but she runs away and takes up with Peadar (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a musician with a car. He's an underdeveloped character, essentially a plot contrivance to complicate things between Nicholas and Isabel, but he's not a cardboard cad. Williams and experienced director Polly Steele (Let Me Go) do a fair job of juggling the moves between time and place but sometimes important elements - like a painting by William that plays a crucial role - aren't dealt with as clearly or skilfully as they should be. As mentioned, it takes a long time for Nicholas and Isabel to meet, after a near miss or two, and their falling in love feels rather too rushed and underplayed. Not that the full gushing Hollywood treatment was needed but the handling seems clumsy. The way Nicholas is kept around for story purposes isn't entirely convincing either. There's an air of muted fatalism about things: people don't seem to get too passionate or upset. The film benefits from a fine cast. O'Shea was very likeable in the heartwarming boarding-school drama Handsome Devil (in which he starred with Nicholas Galitzine) and, playing a fairly subdued character here, is a sympathetic hero throughout. Skelly is also very good: you hope things will end well for them. Brosnan seems slightly odd casting as a scruffy bohemian but he and the other veterans are good to have around. Romantic dramas can end happily or tragically, hopefully or bittersweetly: without spoiling the film, the ending doesn't seem entirely clear, which is a little frustrating. But the painting, when finally viewed, does have some impact. It, like the film, could have had more. Truman Capote wrote, "More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones." In this film, God seems to be playing with that idea, toying with people's hopes and dreams and lives, giving them inspiration that leads to suffering, and granting at least some wishes but with a twist or a capricious sense of timing. Or maybe it's all down to some other kind of supernatural goings-on, or to fate. Or, if you're not into such metaphysical speculations, maybe things like coincidence just happen. This Irish romantic drama takes its sweet time to unfold and then crams a lot towards the end in a rush that hinders, rather than enhances, its impact. We have to wait a long time before the young lovers even meet, and even longer to discover what the title means. Niall Williams adapted his own novel: it's his first movie script, and the task might have been better entrusted to a screenwriter with more experience and objectivity. Four Letters of Love is also full of cliches from the Emerald Isle and from movies set there. Dancing merry jigs to jolly songs? Tick. A stern Mother Superior at a drab Catholic girls' boarding school? Tick. Impractical husbands and longsuffering wives? A score featuring wordless, ethereal female vocals? To be sure, to be sure. There are no banshees, but there do appear to be ghosts. There's also some spectacular scenery, gorgeously shot by Damien Elliott. The story begins in the 1970s. One day at the office, civil servant William Coughlin (Pierce Brosnan) has an epiphany and chucks in his job to become a painter. He abruptly leaves his wife Bette (Imelda May) and son Nicholas (Fionn O'Shea) to head west, leaving them bewildered and poor: Bette never recovers from the shock, and William comes and goes as he pleases. Meanwhile, on the island where William goes to paint, Isabel (Ann Skelly) is helping to care for her brother Sean (Donal Finn), who's wheelchair-bound and mute after a stroke. Isabel's parents - schoolteacher Muiris (Gabriel Byrne) and mother Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) - send her off to a boarding school but she runs away and takes up with Peadar (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a musician with a car. He's an underdeveloped character, essentially a plot contrivance to complicate things between Nicholas and Isabel, but he's not a cardboard cad. Williams and experienced director Polly Steele (Let Me Go) do a fair job of juggling the moves between time and place but sometimes important elements - like a painting by William that plays a crucial role - aren't dealt with as clearly or skilfully as they should be. As mentioned, it takes a long time for Nicholas and Isabel to meet, after a near miss or two, and their falling in love feels rather too rushed and underplayed. Not that the full gushing Hollywood treatment was needed but the handling seems clumsy. The way Nicholas is kept around for story purposes isn't entirely convincing either. There's an air of muted fatalism about things: people don't seem to get too passionate or upset. The film benefits from a fine cast. O'Shea was very likeable in the heartwarming boarding-school drama Handsome Devil (in which he starred with Nicholas Galitzine) and, playing a fairly subdued character here, is a sympathetic hero throughout. Skelly is also very good: you hope things will end well for them. Brosnan seems slightly odd casting as a scruffy bohemian but he and the other veterans are good to have around. Romantic dramas can end happily or tragically, hopefully or bittersweetly: without spoiling the film, the ending doesn't seem entirely clear, which is a little frustrating. But the painting, when finally viewed, does have some impact. It, like the film, could have had more.
The Age
4 days ago
- The Age
Helena Bonham Carter and Pierce Brosnan can't save this clanger of a film
FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE ★★ (M) 109 minutes At the outset of Four Letters of Love, a man is touched by God. Toiling away in a dingy Dublin office, middle-aged civil servant William Coughlan (Pierce Brosnan) spies a square of sunlight on his desk and spontaneously decides to chuck it all in and become a painter. Before long, he's doing artist stuff like growing his hair shoulder-length and abandoning his family. Meanwhile, in the west of Ireland, we're introduced to Isabel Gore (Ann Skelly), a younger free spirit who says things like 'I want to go wild today' as she frolics on the edge of a cliff. With all that, we're still only a couple of minutes into this wildly over-the-top melodrama, directed by UK-based Polly Steele, whose previous credits include the unfortunately titled climbing documentary The Mountain Within Me, and scripted by the Irish writer Niall Williams, adapting his 1997 novel. Williams' field isn't out-and-out trash but a particular brand of frantic 'literary' overwriting, much of which gets channelled here into Fionn O'Shea's voiceover as William's son Nicholas, looking back at his early-1970s youth from decades on ('To these days I am to return again and again throughout my life, for in them is the immanence of love'). Isabel and Nicholas are soulmates, she with her frizzy red hair, he with his look of gormless yearning. But the film takes its time bringing them together, tantalising us by having them cross paths a couple of times without meeting. By halfway through, one of William's paintings has wound up in the possession of Isabel's parents, Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) and Muiris (Gabriel Byrne). But even when Nicholas seeks it out, this isn't enough to put him in the same room as Isabel, who is meanwhile set on marrying Peader (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), her designated Mr Wrong. In spirit, this is a very slightly elevated Hallmark movie – but there are worse things to be, and under the circumstances it's a point in Steele's favour that she isn't afraid of excess. Like Williams, she goes all out: wide-angle lenses, shafts of light illuminating otherwise drab interiors, sweeping shots of the craggy coastline with waves crashing onto rocks.
