nationality: Ireland
wri./dir. Neil Jordon
based on the book by Patrick McCabe
110 mins
Screening at the Chauvel

So they shoot piggies in Ireland too. Well the swine has to be culled to be eaten, so someone has to do it. And so to the Butcher Boy. Little boy cropped in red and pepped on American cartoons and cowboy ethics. Set in a rural Irish town and country. Bonds of friendship made to be broken. Visions of a divine Virgin Mary (with hair, no less, a lovely and verbally serene Sinead O'Connor - how I love thee with long locks), cameo appearances from the cream and the curd of Irish talent (a la Sean Hughes) and the odd scrap of pseudo-surrealist in frame intrusion of fantastic imagination, nuclear explosions, and dry-as-a-bone humour.

Actually the humour is probably all that saves this film, considering the vast hype and blatant advertising that this Boy has engendered. I mean, the ambient details of the 1950s Ireland are all extremely relevant (like the Virgin over the Lord, the backdoor worship of America through comics and JFK through televisual homage, sons of Ireland all no doubt), but the direction has that dry feeling, like story and great dialogue is primal to the film, and yet... These are noble intentions of course, but something is still lacking. The point of the film is made but not satisfactorily. I wanted more that semi-intelligible Irish brogue, I wanted more danger than mean and realistic performances. Not flashy camera work, but a unified stream of layered voices and perspectives. Maybe this is another comedown from the modern-day strain of disappointing endings.

The film was good, but not great, and many oceans fill into the space between these two. I didn't want more, I didn't want less which would have been equally beneficial, I just wanted that fuzzy feeling of a unified whole, that knowing vibe where everything relates or is prefigured or somehow determined by the greater fates of narrative power. The piggy kid is superbly realistic, but someone behind the camera, probably behind the storyboard too did not realise what a bad aftertaste the ending would arouse. And if that isn't a warning than you should experience the film for yourself. I am hoping to speak to some other viewers of the film so they may persuade me of the film's virtues, of which there are several, but for the moment, and from where I was sitting in the Senstadium smorgasbord, the film and its incomplete technique left me a shade below mildly depressed.

rino breebaart
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