A quiet film with a great deal of low-spoken power, “The Quiet Girl,” a work almost entirely in Irish with subtitles, is the first Irish-language film to be nominated for an Academy Award in the best international feature film category. Written and directed by Colm Bairead and based on the story “Foster” by Claire Keegan, the film tells the early 1980s-set tale of Cait (Catherine Clinch, making a stunning debut), a shy and mostly nonspeaking 9-year-old girl with several older sisters, a neglectful mother (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh), who is heavily pregnant, and a farmer father (Michael Patrick), who is surly, dissolute and a degenerate gambler.
Driving home from the pub with Cait, Dan picks up his mistress, who is walking alone along the road. A hungry Cait, who is a bed wetter and poor reader, steals some milk from a classmate only to have a brute knock it into her lap. The girl leads a lonely and drab existence until her mother sends her to live with her mother’s middle-aged cousin, Eibhlin Cinnsealach (Carrie Crowley), and her remote dairy farmer husband Sean (Andrew Bennett).
Eibhlin takes the girl under wing and shows her how to do chores around the house, how to run the vacuum cleaner. With Eibhlin and Sean, Cait becomes accustomed to a regular cycle of meals and baths and an evening hair-brushing ritual. When Cait wanders off while Sean tends to the barn where he milks his cows, the man becomes flustered. She just went off to look for a broom to help him.
Eibhlin takes Cait to the farm’s well, which she claims has healing powers and which she warns the girl to be wary of because it is deep and flush with the ground. The Cinnsealachs help their neighbors, who are fellow farmers. Once a week or so, their friends come to their home to play cards and share some whiskey. Eibhlin takes Cait, newly garbed in a store-bought dress and shoes, to a funeral, her first.
One of Eibhlin’s neighbors, a busybody, interrogates the girl and reveals a sad, dark secret.
“The Quiet Girl” is a silent film half the time. Writer-director Bairead has a poet’s eye for the lyrical beauty of the Irish countryside with its miraculous trees and shimmering light. “The Quiet Girl” reminds us that film is a visual medium and that the natural world is full of as much magic, if not more, than any line of dialogue or computer-generated image. The film is a story told in the language of bodies, faces, the land and the light from the skies. Although Clinch is this film’s revelation, Crowley makes us see how Cait brings Eibhlin back to life from the premature old age that has gripped her and Sean like a curse. In one scene, Sean asks Cait to run to the mailbox down by the road, and Bairead turns the sequence into an ode to a young body slipping the bonds of Earth.
Cait must also learn to slip her immediate family’s bonds. She begins to do this during her summer with Eibhlin and Sean, a summer full of such mysteries as the locomotive-decorated wallpaper in the room allotted to her and reading “Heidi” aloud with Sean before bedtime. “The Quiet Girl” is about a neglected child who blossoms in the warmth of affection and “minding.” The film is a superhero-movie slayer. Cinematography by Kate McCullough is radiant. The gentle score by Stephen Rennicks (“Good Luck to You, Leo Grande”) is another asset.
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'THE QUIET GIRL'
(In Irish and English with English subtitles)
Grade: A-
Rated: PG-13 (for some strong language and smoking)
Running time: 1:34
How to watch: Now in theaters
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