The Quiet Girl (2022)
Cáit (Catherine Clinch) slowly discovers her new future as The Quiet Girl
Watching this exquisite movie, I felt as if the Dutch painting master Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675) had made his way into the 21st century.
And got hold of a movie camera. And, as with his indelible pigmented portraiture, induced the people before him not to pose but simply to be.
Writer-director Colm Bairead, in his beguiling feature film debut, already invites comparison with visual old masters but also rivals his most talented contemporaries.
Bairead, cinematographer Kate McCullogh and editor John Murphy produce work that rises to the more elevated reaches of today’s moviemaking art.
They appreciate the virtues of simplicity. The trustworthy screenplay is adapted from the story “Foster” by Claire Keegan, an award-winning Irish writer.
The script steadfastly relies on understatement, silence, sorrow that can barely bring itself to speak.
Set in 1981 in a remote region of Ireland, the movie submerges us in a child’s unspoken anguish from the start.
In the opening shots we see nine-year- old Cáit (Catherine Clinch), in great distress, hiding in a field from her siblings. She hates going into the house she shares with her indifferent parents and three uncaring sisters.
Her pregnant mother Kate (Mathair Cháit) isn’t looking forward to the fifth child she’ll have to rear with her callous, unfaithful husband Michael (Athair Cháit). He can’t knock back quite enough pints of ale to keep his cold slothfulness from showing.
Cait hides from their bickering out in the surrounding fields. Frightened and lonely, she lingers in the lush, piercingly green countryside as if it’s her only refuge.
Her father calls her “the wanderer”. She has to be coaxed into the house to share meager meals and listen to her parents’ bitter exchanges.
With a child on the way, the parents agree to get Cáit off their hands by sending her to stay with a cousin, Eibhlin (Carrie Crowley), and her husband Seán (Andrew Bennett).
It’s only a three-hour drive away, but once Cáit arrives it’s as though she’s entered another world.
Eibhlin and Seán keep a neat, brightly lit home; upon arrival, Cáit is immediately invited to take a long warm bath. Clearly, this is an unaccustomed luxury for her.
Cáit's father forgot to take her suitcase out of the car, so Eibhlin outfits the girl with hardy, comfortable clothes, which wrap her in an awkward lushness that feels new – like acceptance.
The outfits are a boy’s clothes but that doesn’t bother Cáit. Yet she notices the way Eibhlin hands them over to her almost with an air of ritual. The garments seem not just given but, strangely, bestowed.
In Bairead’s arrival as a feature director, movies now have a self-assured unruffled prodigy. I can’t recall any filmmaker in recent years who so roundly knocked me sideways. Off-balance, enthralled, I couldn’t imagine what he was attempting, minute to minute.
Cáit cautiously joins Seán in managing the couple’s productive dairy farm, and before long she’s mastered calming and milking the huge cows. She doesn’t even mind brushing down the muck a cow shed builds up.
And before long Seán has her gleefully racing to the mailbox to pick up each day’s delivery.
Delicately prepared meals and fresh well water brighten her skin, and with her hair pulled back, her shy, reluctant smile takes on a glowing confidence.
Can Cáit have come into, within a few months, what she knew she was missing but couldn’t actually name, a real home?
Yes and no. For all Eibhlin and Seán's affection, something feels unsettled in their tidy household. The couple haven’t seen Cáit since she was an infant, yet they praise and cherish her simplest accomplishments as if they were talismans.
From the girl’s peeling potatoes to drawing well water to preparing gooseberry jam, they take a kind of delight in Cáit’s performance of domestic tasks that the girl can’t quite fathom.
Slowly we see a question fill Cáit’s eyes. They’re bestowing clothes, concern and kindness on her, but what’s behind the light she sees in their eyes? What could she possibly be bestowing on them?
Eibhlin, Cáit and Seán patiently make a home together in The Quiet Girl
The Quiet Girl gracefully keeps this richer, more laden, paradoxical concern just beyond our reach. We don’t understand the depth of Eibhlin and Seán’s empathy and reassurance any sooner than Cáit does.
They have her only for a summer. But she’s awakened something in them – and discovered a capacity in herself – that no one could have seen coming.
Just how deep these euphoric, disturbing feelings run we’re left to measure for ourselves. And to wonder, for all three of them: Can there be any turning back?
Bairead is masterful at collaborating with, yet not over-directing, his actors. Part of the movie’s visual scheme is boldly, unapologetically, painterly.
He and his actors capture moment after moment – in the house, in the barns, out in the fields picking fruit – where action isn’t actually what his camera wants to pin down for us.
It’s stillness. The pauses between actions where all of us wait, collect ourselves, calculate the next step we might take toward closeness, revelation, possible healing. To let quiet, speak.
I didn’t spot a grandiose moment in the entire picture. Ferreting out a character’s motives is one of the most enjoyable pleasures we take from movies. How the director sets us up to relish revelations when they come is the most crucial of directorial tasks.
But I have no idea how Bairead gets actors to communicate so much longing with mere silence, immobility and the most fragile sort of hope on their faces.
And here, with the three principals, we wait for answers we aren’t even sure are coming, much less can we guess what they’ll look like when they do.
This is moviemaking way out on the edge of what would seem to be ordinary daily life. It’s managed with heart-stopping assurance, like brush strokes slowly accumulating on a canvas, shading experience even as it pulses with expectancy.
In Bairead’s arrival as a feature director, movies now have a self-assured unruffled prodigy.
I can’t recall any filmmaker in recent years who so roundly knocked me sideways. Off-balance, enthralled, I couldn’t imagine what he was attempting, minute to minute.
I doubted from the first frames that he’d miscalculate. He never did. By the end I felt sure something rare had been bestowed on me.
Thanks! I try not to watch second-rate versions anymore, these days, just to see things before the Oscars or whatever - there's always plenty of great stuff to watch that can be watched under the right conditions and I'm generally quite patient, I don't mind waiting too much. :)
"All About Eve" is probably one I should see again too. As an adolescent, watching it on TV, I was underwhelmed (thought it was very well-acted and sharply-written but it didn't do much for me beyond that), but as an adult I might find more things to like about it. And I've been meaning to watch "Peyton Place" myself for a while, now. (I tend to be significantly less cynical than most viewers these days, so I might not find the things you mention corny or naive at all, although it's also possible I will, if they're also markedly dated - we'll see, when I get to it.) Among many other classics - therein lying the problem... :)
"Give me simple and direct! On a large scale! I fear sophistication and hipness are draining movies of some of their unique power."
Oh, yeah, couldn't agree more - as you might remember, I'm a big fan of the old emotional epic... :)
Absolutely! Great things to come, surely, from Colm Bairéad, assuming (and hoping) that the opportunities come... I would have seen "Close" by now, too, but I just haven't been able to find a good quality version anywhere - yet. I'm sure it will turn up, though, I'm not worried about it. (Needless to say, no chance of my local cinema showing it. Probably not even the larger theaters in Romania will, sadly.)
Happy viewings for you this year, as well! :) Looking forward to a lot of 2022 stuff I haven't had the time to check out before the Oscars, as well as many things (and rewatches) from other years.