An Cailín Ciúin | The Quiet Girl
Last night I went to see the IFI showing of An Cailín Ciúin/The Quiet Girl, Colm Bairéad’s treatment of Claire Keegan’s superb story Foster. This was followed by a Q and A led by Lenny Abrahamson with Bairéad and the three principals - Carrie Crowley, Andrew Bennett and Catherine Clinch. The film is mostly in Irish, though the girl’s father (played with tense aggression by Michael Patric) significantly uses English.
It is, as Colm Bairéad said at the start, a quiet little film making a lot of noise. Reviews have been uniformly positive, and they are right: this film deserves the attention it is - delightfully - getting.
Foster, which can be read online on the New Yorker site in a slightly different version to the book, bears several re-readings. I have taught it many times and it never fails to grip a class, which in some ways is surprising, since as the director has said, it seems to be ‘just’ a story about a girl going to stay with relatives. What is particularly impressive is that the film also grips relentlessly for its 90 minutes; filmed in proper order, its narrative drive never lets you go. It is a faithful version of Keegan’s writing, with small extra ‘dabs’ on the canvas (the brief introduction of a significant woman, for instance), but it retains the same emotional power from the text, climaxing in those devastating final moments at the farm gate.
One small thing that has changed is that now the girl has a name, Cáit. Keegan’s narrative is a first-person one, and in her comments on the story, she said
I think one of the things that Mrs Kinsella did was she did not want to get too fond of the girl; I think she had a fear of getting too fond of a child who she knew she would have to lose at the end of the summer. And so one of the ways she handled this - and I think handled it well - was to give her no name to address her by. It’s again the power of naming or not giving someone a name.
Cáit is played remarkably by Catherine Clinch, who described last night how she was discovered via an iPhone audition after finding out about the film in 4th Class in school. Somehow the compelling first-person narrative in the written story is fully transmuted into the still, wide-eyed face of this young actor. Alongside her, Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett are extraordinary as the Kinsellas: Crowley’s face etched with the emotions she is rarely allowed to express openly, and Bennett deeply moving as we witness his delicately developing closeness to the girl, his initial gruff shyness dropping away. That last scene is the culmination of all they have been through, as Crowley weeps in the car and Clinch wraps herself around Bennett. He said of one powerful scene (so much centres on the kitchen), that all I had to do was eat sandwiches but of course there is a world of experienced acting in what he does.
It is a quiet film, with restrained dialogue. It opens with the gentle noises of farm and countryside, and an image of the girl partly covered by grasses, from which she will emerge into the summer she is ‘minded’ (one of Keegan’s key words), a kind of rebirth. It is confident in its own stillness, confident that viewers have all they need within the apparent modesty of the story. It presents us with a cinematic world whole in itself, allowing in just faint noises from the outside with the radio and the television set unobtrusively anchoring us in the early 80s: Bunny Carr, Michael O’Hehir, Pat Henderson, Wanderly Wagon (Keegan mentions the 1981 hunger strikes). It is appropriately shot in academy ratio, Bairéad saying that the girl’s horizons haven’t expanded yet, a kind of constraining equivalent to Keegan’s use of the present tense.
At the end the Kinsellas drive Cáit back to her family, the colour of her dress complementing the colour of their car, a family now in all but name. When saying goodbye to the adults both use the phrase my love. Those who have read Keegan will know that (no spoiler) there is a devastating loss at the heart of this story, which makes this final loss all the more heartbreaking.
In the words of Lenny Abrahamson last night: What a beautiful film.
END
Claire Keegan’s short novel Small Things Like These was my book of 2021.
RTÉ: Colm Bairéad on why An Cailín Ciúin has captured hearts.
Donald Clarke in the Irish Times calls it an unqualified success.
Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian says it already feels like a classic.