Love Among the Ruins

"I WANT OUT."

"Not to act is to act."

Cat McCrystal is thus quashed in one of his many attempts to withdraw from his tenuous involvement in the Irish Republican Army. He is a mild-natured young man who falls into the organization's web by innocently doing a friend a favor and becomes a reluctant pawn. He is a peripheral puppet, rather than an 'actor', on the political stage. The father he lives with and the woman he grows to love remain non-actors. Nevertheless, the Irish 'Troubles' permeate to the core of their lives. Fear and tragedy are etched indellibly on to these, and the other characters, that people this powerful, understated film.

Bernard MacLaverty, in adapting his 1983 novel for the screen, has preserved a penetrating economy of story-telling. With his small cast of characters, MacLavery deftly illustrates the tensions between sides in the Northern Ireland conflict, presenting frail attempts at connection and willful acts of destruction. The division between the ordinary and the terrible, the human and inhuman, are made disturbingly ambiguous.

Cal (played by John Lynch) is an unemployed, listless adolescent who lives with his father--the only Catholics remaining on an all, Protestant housing estate. Pro-British regalia clutter the place in a display of fierce loyalty. Threats on their lives, their house, their dignity, abound. Father (played by Donal McCann) and son are movingly bound by fear, whispering in their own house. They live on the edge, vulnerable yet resilient, caught up inextricably in Ulster's tangled animosities. "No Protestant git's going to drive me out; y'have to kill me first." The father's defiance is juxtaposed against his despair when his son stumbles into the house, all beaten-up by three locals; "Bastards, bastards all of them."

And we see the hurts on the other side too. Marcella (Helen Mirren) is the mother of a small child whose policeman husband was shot in his own farmhouse by the I.R.A. She works in a small lending library and lives on the farms with her husband's parents. Hers is a numb existence as she unwillingly shares the burden of tragedy with her late husband's family.

There was "bad bastards on both sides," as a Protestant admits, and there are innocent sufferers too. "If they were all like Shamie [Cal's father] there'd be less trouble 'round here," a Catholic remarks. There is one tragic twist in MacLaverty's plot which reverberates throughout the film and which, ironically, leads to a poignant link between the opposite sides. The killing of the policeman, which opens the film, is the killing for which Cal was the unwilling driver.

And it is with that policeman's wife that Cal becomes compellingly infatuated. He glimpses her through library bookshelves, follows her after her work, and even finds employment at the farm where she lives and where her husband was killed. A curious blend of infatuation and guilt draws this youth from trembling, zombied isolation in his father's house to vigorous, healthy work. Hiding from the I.R.A. and the police in a hut near the farmhouse, Cal finds solace in the company of the similarly isolated Marcella. The ensuing relationship is the more remarkable for its seeming impossibility; a fragile, temporary salvage from the wreckage of their situations.

Helen Mirren and John Lynch play their roles with a great deal of sensitivity. Mirren is attractively demure, suitably drained of spirit, and reluctant to connect with the people about her. Lynch's pale, emaciated body, his sallow face with long unkempt hair, and his silent dejected look combine to create a continual haunting presence. Donal McCann, as Cal's father, contributes to the most moving moments in the film (those scenes between father and son that intersperse and intensify the story.)

Pat O'Connor's direction sustains many of the qualities of MacLaverty's novel. An unintrusive presentation of characters and story, and a lack of bias, bring us to a similar proximity with the events. Occasionally, the abrupt switches of scene and brief flashbacks draw attention to themselves to a distracting extent. Time and the pattern of events are, perhaps inevitably, more satisfactorily handled in the novel. The music and photography complement the action seamlessly.

Cal is a fine film and also that rare thing: a successful adaptation of a novel. It stands as a penetrating documentary that has no message, as a political thriller that is not an adventure, and as a love story without romance. Quietly it immerses us into the daily realities of life in contemporary Northern Ireland.