IRISH FILM NEW YORK '11: Critic's Notebook
by Nick Schager 
The docs have it at
Irish Film New York, a new screening series founded and directed by Niall McKay, former steward of the San Francisco Irish Film Festival and co-founder of the L.A. Irish Film Festival. Taking place this weekend (September 30th though October 2nd) at NYU's Cantor Film Center, IFNY aims to be a premiere showcase for movies and moviemakers hailing from the Emerald Isle, offering a selection of six varied features that speak, directly and indirectly, to the past and modern Irish condition. And for its inaugural outing, IFNY stands tall courtesy of its non-fiction works, which unlike its somewhat more clich�d and formulaic fictional submissions, capture a stinging sense of Irish history, character and culture with an effortlessness that?s matched by an insightfulness into its all-too-human subjects.
IFNY commences with a bang, as its opening night film
Knuckle is its indisputable standout. Ian Palmer's rough-around-the-edges documentary traces 12 years in the life of the Quinn McDonnaghs, an Irish Traveller (i.e. nomadic) family engaged in decades-old feuds that are settled through bare-knuckle boxing. Palmer focuses most intently on undefeated brawler James Quinn McDonnagh, an affable and talkative bruiser who, despite his unblemished record and de facto role as the McDonnaghs' defender, proclaims a disinterest in continuing to fight but is repeatedly drawn back into matches?for money, and to uphold the family name?against rival clans. Through interviews with James, his relatives, and his adversaries (all of whom are close or distant cousins), as well as via VHS-grade footage of the brawls, which take place secretly on country roads or in abandoned asphalt lots, the film trades in quarrels and conflict resolution of a decidedly savage, old-school sort.
Videotape taunts are traded back and forth between families like juvenile-macho WWE worked shoots, perpetuating rivalries that ostensibly stem back to two early-'90s murders, but which have long since been transformed into just a vehicle for channeling masculine rage and asserting king-of-the-hill dominance. Palmer's crude DIY cinematography provides intimate perspective on his subjects and their gnarly backwoods-boxing ethos, which places a premium on go-nowhere definitions of toughness, power and family honor. Like its aesthetics,
Knuckle's fisticuffing men are blisteringly primitive, and depicted with a blunt even-handedness, as Palmer confesses both repulsion and fascination with his chosen subcultural milieu. Meanwhile, in quick cutaways to children that bolster one woman's concern over the lessons being learned by the young, the director locates the way in which the Quinn McDonnaghs and their ilk actively and passively pass down their violent traditions to forthcoming generations, all in service of blood feuds that?since they're between relatives?are acts of willful self-destruction.
While both
Parked (a rote Colm Meaney headliner) and
32A (a '70s-era teen-girl coming-of-age drama) also tackle the perilous nature of youth,
Knuckle's lamentation for future generations finds a piercing match in
Pyjama Girls. Maya Derrington's documentary shares with Ian Palmer's film an engaging proximity with its subjects, here teenagers Lauren and Tara, two girls living in the Irish flats (i.e. projects) who wholeheartedly embrace the country's burgeoning fad of wearing pajama pants in public. That clothing statement is a deliberate act of rebellion, viewed by older generations as a disrespectful sign of criminal defiance, though Derrington isn't after a straight portrait of socio-economic class warfare?which nonetheless lingers beneath her work's well-composed surface?as much as she?s interested in the very particular struggles, traumas and misery of Lauren and Tara, the former of whom is still grappling with her horrifically volatile upbringing at the hands of an abusive junkie mother.
With an off-the-cuff bounciness aided by a sprightly electronic score,
Pyjama Girls tracks the mundane melodramas of its teen girls, many involving discussions of prior bloody fights or desires to instigate new ones. Yet more impressive than its depiction of day-to-day delinquency are its tonal modulations. As Lauren nastily insults her devoted Nanny, candidly discusses the pain wrought by her mother's treatment of both her and her kid sister, and, in one wrenching instance, describes a run-in on a public bus with a former acquaintance of her mother's who casually states that he might be her father, the film assumes an air of somber gravity. A raw peek into on-the-skids Irish adolescence, Derrington's documentary delivers?as epitomized by images of the girls on brightly colored carnival rides twirling and rising in the nighttime sky?a subtly heartbreaking snapshot of wayward kids spinning hopelessly, irreversibly out of control.
Posted by ahillis at September 30, 2011 3:29 PM
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