How little you need to make a good film. Or how much.
2022 was a great year for films set in Ireland. There was The Banshees of Inisherin that deserved all the praise that it got (and will keep getting, inevitably). There was The Wonder that was brilliant and bizarre in equal measure. And then there was The Quiet Girl.
Sometimes I think it is the best kind of cinema, the one where nothing happens. Because cinema has so much more than a plot to express itself: there is a silence, a melody, a sideways glance. The Quiet Girl employs all of that, and more. A nine-year-old girl, quiet, beautiful and unloved, goes to spend her summer with distant relatives, on an Irish farm in 1981. This being a classic coming-of-age story, the girl navigates her uncertain existence through love, death and a terrible secret. Mostly love. And through it all, she says so little. "So many people", muses one of the central characters, "lost the opportunity to say nothing".
This being a classic coming-of-age story, the quiet girl changes. She does not become loud, or even louder, but little but little her silence is becoming weightier and more knowing. By the end of it, we have to wonder how much she has really changed. The true change, however, is always imperceptible, invisible to the naked eye. Which is not too easy to do within an art form whose main attribute is predominantly visual. The Quiet Girl manages to do that, still. The silent force of the film is in the detail, in the unspoken and in one of the most powerful endings I have seen in a while.
My favourite story from James Joyce's Dubliners has always been "Araby". It is a simple tale of a boy who wants to come to a fair and only manages to get there when the stands are closing and the darkness has set in. It is a story of low-key minimalism and yet it has always seemed gripping to me, and has never really failed to reduce me to the most basic emotional response. I have often wondered why. But then perhaps it is only the world which does not happen to you that is truly worth discovering.
