The nine-year-old girl Cáit grows up in the Irish countryside in socially disordered conditions, as it would be called today. The mother is pregnant again, the father is quite callous, the family is chronically broke, the farm is largely neglected.
At school, among her peers, the quiet and reserved Cáit is misunderstood and ridiculed. Expecting a new baby, her parents send her over the summer to a distant relative who lives alone with her husband. They give her all the affection and attention she’s always craved, but Cáit discovers that even their supposed-to-be-secret home has a painful past.
Tiho dekle is a feature-length feature film debut, directed by a documentary filmmaker, based on a short story Colm Bairéad. It is accompanied by some interesting facts, such as being the first film made in Irish to be nominated for an Academy Award, and being the highest-grossing and most critically-acclaimed Irish feature. Underneath all this load of labels, however, shines a true gem of an intimate drama that reveals the complex inner world of the main character without any major twists. An acting role, one could also say the presence of a young person Catherine Clinchis one of the most surprising things to be seen in cinemas in recent years.
In the author’s approach, you can find a pinch of the fairy tale, not in the sense of sweetness, but in the fact that behind the concrete story we sense the universally recognizable hardships and fears of growing up. In the condensed narrative, we get to know the different dynamics of family relationships and individual characters, birth and death; in the short summer period, shown at a very calm pace, Cáit experiences quite a few turning points and realizations of growing up. Here, there is not even a moment’s suspicion that it is just scriptural narrative mechanisms, but the filmic narrative works distinctly organically and holistically.
The film The Quiet Girl is a true masterpiece of the unspoken, not only because of the shy heroine, who may not understand everything that is happening in and around her, but because of the imaginative dosage of information. Each scene is like an additional stone in a mosaic. The nature of the Irish countryside is beautiful, here and there even idyllic, but under this surface you can sense various abuses, cruelty and indifference.
I believe that he had a strong influence on the visual image of the film The Silent Girl Paul Cézannewhose calm Provence landscapes in many variations of dark green and gray tones hide a premonition of passing, deep melancholy and shadow in every sense of the word.
But the greatness of the Silent Girl is that it knows how to emphasize the light. Cáit shines.
From the show We’re going to the cinema.
Source: Rtvslo
