Fostering contentment
The title of The Quiet Girl isn't messing around: the girl, nine-year-old Cáit (Catherine Clinch) is certainly very quiet. So is everything else about the film, in fact: even the overbearing musical score by Stephen Rennicks is still very quiet and soft while it's weighting the movie down. For his debut feature, adapted from the 2010 novella Foster by Claire Keegan, writer-director Colm Bairéad has opted to go small and soft and delicate at every possible turn, creating a 94-minute film (barely even a wisp, by the standards of modern running times) focused on silently looking, understanding things through gestures and silences; or at least not understanding, but observing very intently. It's an approach I find extremely easy to admire, foregrounding the visual expression of narrative and character emotions rather than just telling us everything, and with a very consistent and controlled visual style at that.
Admirable, then, unquestionably. Likeable, though? Even just plain good? I've been having a much harder time with that part, and part of what's made it hard is that even just the span of one day between watching the film and trying to write about, in the hopes of getting some of my thoughts about it in order, have allowed rather distressingly large chunks of the movie to gently dissolve into fairy dust, wafting out of my brain at speed. The downside to being so unstintingly delicate is that The Quiet Girl somewhat forgets to "do" anything with its quiet girl - by the end of the film, I'm not really sure that I've learned anything about her individually, as compared to being given some kind of window onto The Universal Experience Of Impoverished Children Who Don't Get Enough Love, But Then Get It. Which is already a fairly specific universal experience, plus The Quiet Girl makes a huge claim for even more specificity by having somewhere around 97% of its dialogue rendered in Irish - not the first movie ever made in that language, but I think you could safely make the argument that no other Irish-language film has ever enjoyed nearly this much visibility outside of Ireland. And while I refuse to believe that creative decision was entirely free of marketing considerations, and it definitely feels like the sort of thing that every review of The Quiet Girl mentions because it's designed to be mentioned in reviews rather than because it gives some crucial way into this story that could be achieved no other way, it at least pins things down very much. This is a film about a specific culture, with specific values, inhabited by specific people, and I am a big proponent of the idea that truly universal art can only come out of specificity. So far, so good.
Is it, though, about a specific quiet girl? I frankly don't see it. Cáit, as written and then again as composed within cinematographer Kate McCullough's rather conspicuous 1.37:1 frame, is just so passive, such a receptacle for what she sees, so much our conduit into the film more than an object of study, that at the end of the 94 minutes - which, for the record, feel longer - I didn't really feel like I'd learned anything about her, beyond that she reacts to sad things by becoming sad. Mostly, she's just a stand-in for well-crafted but ultimately fairly generic notions about "the way children start to learn of the adult world" - not an unworthy exercise, to be sure, but nor is it a new exercise, and The Quiet Girl has nothing other than the language of its screenplay to set itself apart from other films on the same model. It is, at least, very impeccably crafted, with Bairéad and McCullough always making very sure to keep the camera height level with Clinch's head, and to use inordinately shallow focus to keep her and her perspective front-and-center, while adults kind of mill about indistinctly. It is absolutely not a bad film, though I think I can without hesitation mount the argument that it is a dull one.
Part of it is that selfsame impeccable craft. The Quiet Girl is very "precise", in a way that tends to lock everything down, and contribute to the overall feeling of hushed seriousness. I find it somewhat draining to actually look at, which is at least in part no doubt due to my own bias: I've hit a point with digital cinematography using extremely shallow focus where I find it as much of an irritating, thoughtless tic by "artistic" "indie" filmmakers as jittery handheld was back in the mid-2000s. And this has some of the most microscopically measured-out shallow focus that I think you could hope to find right now, so tight that there are shots where the front of somebody's outstretched hand is in focus and the back of the same hand is not. It's impressively accurate, I guess, but it leads to a lot of slow blocking and static shots, and there's plenty about this film that's making a show of how subdued it is without having to keep all of the actors sitting mostly still on top of it.
The actors, at least, are good. Clinch has very little asked of her - she's mostly being employed in a feature-length Kuleshov experiment, looking offscreen with a mildly distraught expression, and letting the reverse shots do the work of storytelling and character building - but she has a preternaturally calm face that makes those experiments work well, anyway. The adults surrounding her are, meanwhile, quite warm and winning. Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett play the middle-aged cousins who take her in when her hapless mother gets pregnant yet again, and both of her rattled, thoughtless, broke parents think it will be easier to just not have to deal with her being around for a while. And that précis pretty clearly predicts what kind of performances we should expect from Crowley and Bennett, though they both underplay things in nice ways: Crowley is sure to make her character's maternal warmth feel somewhat discolored by a thread of desperation at this being the last chance she'll have to raise a child, and Bennett is given the gift of the film's most fully worked-out character arc, as the gruff, distant adult male who secretly is a big-hearted softie but will never show it except in momentary flashes, ideally when nobody else is looking.
So, I mean, that kind of story, with that kind of performance, but Bennett is good at executing it (though I'd still give Crowley best-in-show honors; her choices weren't as obviously preordained by the script). And really "this isn't really surprising and not even necessarily interesting, but it's executed well" is sort of the motto of The Quiet Girl as a whole. It's nice, it plays out smoothly, and it hits the emotional beats it promises to hit. There are people who are more in the market for that kind of thing than I am, and I hope they find this movie.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
Admirable, then, unquestionably. Likeable, though? Even just plain good? I've been having a much harder time with that part, and part of what's made it hard is that even just the span of one day between watching the film and trying to write about, in the hopes of getting some of my thoughts about it in order, have allowed rather distressingly large chunks of the movie to gently dissolve into fairy dust, wafting out of my brain at speed. The downside to being so unstintingly delicate is that The Quiet Girl somewhat forgets to "do" anything with its quiet girl - by the end of the film, I'm not really sure that I've learned anything about her individually, as compared to being given some kind of window onto The Universal Experience Of Impoverished Children Who Don't Get Enough Love, But Then Get It. Which is already a fairly specific universal experience, plus The Quiet Girl makes a huge claim for even more specificity by having somewhere around 97% of its dialogue rendered in Irish - not the first movie ever made in that language, but I think you could safely make the argument that no other Irish-language film has ever enjoyed nearly this much visibility outside of Ireland. And while I refuse to believe that creative decision was entirely free of marketing considerations, and it definitely feels like the sort of thing that every review of The Quiet Girl mentions because it's designed to be mentioned in reviews rather than because it gives some crucial way into this story that could be achieved no other way, it at least pins things down very much. This is a film about a specific culture, with specific values, inhabited by specific people, and I am a big proponent of the idea that truly universal art can only come out of specificity. So far, so good.
Is it, though, about a specific quiet girl? I frankly don't see it. Cáit, as written and then again as composed within cinematographer Kate McCullough's rather conspicuous 1.37:1 frame, is just so passive, such a receptacle for what she sees, so much our conduit into the film more than an object of study, that at the end of the 94 minutes - which, for the record, feel longer - I didn't really feel like I'd learned anything about her, beyond that she reacts to sad things by becoming sad. Mostly, she's just a stand-in for well-crafted but ultimately fairly generic notions about "the way children start to learn of the adult world" - not an unworthy exercise, to be sure, but nor is it a new exercise, and The Quiet Girl has nothing other than the language of its screenplay to set itself apart from other films on the same model. It is, at least, very impeccably crafted, with Bairéad and McCullough always making very sure to keep the camera height level with Clinch's head, and to use inordinately shallow focus to keep her and her perspective front-and-center, while adults kind of mill about indistinctly. It is absolutely not a bad film, though I think I can without hesitation mount the argument that it is a dull one.
Part of it is that selfsame impeccable craft. The Quiet Girl is very "precise", in a way that tends to lock everything down, and contribute to the overall feeling of hushed seriousness. I find it somewhat draining to actually look at, which is at least in part no doubt due to my own bias: I've hit a point with digital cinematography using extremely shallow focus where I find it as much of an irritating, thoughtless tic by "artistic" "indie" filmmakers as jittery handheld was back in the mid-2000s. And this has some of the most microscopically measured-out shallow focus that I think you could hope to find right now, so tight that there are shots where the front of somebody's outstretched hand is in focus and the back of the same hand is not. It's impressively accurate, I guess, but it leads to a lot of slow blocking and static shots, and there's plenty about this film that's making a show of how subdued it is without having to keep all of the actors sitting mostly still on top of it.
The actors, at least, are good. Clinch has very little asked of her - she's mostly being employed in a feature-length Kuleshov experiment, looking offscreen with a mildly distraught expression, and letting the reverse shots do the work of storytelling and character building - but she has a preternaturally calm face that makes those experiments work well, anyway. The adults surrounding her are, meanwhile, quite warm and winning. Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett play the middle-aged cousins who take her in when her hapless mother gets pregnant yet again, and both of her rattled, thoughtless, broke parents think it will be easier to just not have to deal with her being around for a while. And that précis pretty clearly predicts what kind of performances we should expect from Crowley and Bennett, though they both underplay things in nice ways: Crowley is sure to make her character's maternal warmth feel somewhat discolored by a thread of desperation at this being the last chance she'll have to raise a child, and Bennett is given the gift of the film's most fully worked-out character arc, as the gruff, distant adult male who secretly is a big-hearted softie but will never show it except in momentary flashes, ideally when nobody else is looking.
So, I mean, that kind of story, with that kind of performance, but Bennett is good at executing it (though I'd still give Crowley best-in-show honors; her choices weren't as obviously preordained by the script). And really "this isn't really surprising and not even necessarily interesting, but it's executed well" is sort of the motto of The Quiet Girl as a whole. It's nice, it plays out smoothly, and it hits the emotional beats it promises to hit. There are people who are more in the market for that kind of thing than I am, and I hope they find this movie.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
