The Romance of the Irish

Well, it’s been a special weekend, even for those of us not lucky to be Irish. OfTru and Manchester City Council have worked together on the Manchester Irish Festival, affirming and celebrating cultural identity. There’s been films, author events and music. I’ve mentioned before that the blogosphere has opened up reviewing to the ordinary citizen in a fabulously democratic way. I mean we no longer have to listen to the ‘experts’ with their jargon and superior, arrogant ways when we want to learn about films and books and music. The bloggers are doing it for themselves! Everybody can become a ‘citizen journalist’, write their own reviews, without the stuffiness of academia and professional journalism getting in the way. Look at people’s blogs—they’re all talking about the books they’ve read, songs they’ve downloaded, etc. So I thought I’d have a go.

Last night, my partner saw a wonderful new film. We were both deeply moved and I’d like to share our feelings with you as we so often do in this Community. The film was Sam and Lucia, with Rufus Sewell and Kate Winslet. Oh, it was terribly sad. Sewell plays a romantic Irish writer, Sam Beckett, dying alone in Paris, and dwelling on the memory of his one true love. It starts of full of beautiful Irish landscapes, all green, with that lovely wailing wild music in the background. It makes you feel, you know, kind of pagan and one with the misty mountains. There’s a plenitude of vigorous scenes of lively, down-to-earth Dublin life—singing, dancing, drinking (far too much at times—but that’s the Irish for you!), and agreeable flirtations. Young Sam dreams of writing happy comic novels, full of the joys of the simple life. He’s got wild dark gypsyish hair and piercing blue eyes and that charming brogue—really quite ‘dishy’! He travels to Paris to seek his fortune as an assistant to the Grand Old Man of Irish letters, James Joyce. The kindly old humorist acts like an uncle to him and teaches him the mysteries of word craft. Sam falls in love with his beautiful, but frail, daughter Lucia, and she does with him. But war breaks out. There’s a tragic mix-up; they’re separated, she goes mad and kills herself. Sam, deep in sorrow, joins the Resistance and fights for freedom and to try and forget her. You really experience the horrors of fascism. And Sam meets with all the French intellectuals who are defending liberty—like Jean Baudrillard, a hero of mine, actually. We did him at college. Sam becomes a hero, wins the Croix de Guerre and even learns French like a native. But he can never forget Lucia, and he does become a famous writer but the irony is, instead of the happy celebration of Irish joie de vivre that he once aspired to, he can only write sad, deeply tragic, romantic novels, mourning the loss of love. It shows the power of great literature. Becket’s books make us realise that we all share the same deep feelings of love and loss, and yet we all have different identities too—the Irish, the French, women, the mentally ill. And the film has everything—romance, beautiful scenery, even action scenes for the men when Sam’s single-handedly fighting the Nazis. Despite the sadness, I found this a beautiful, life-affirming film that makes us realise that we must triumph over adversity and our inner demons in order to realise our dreams. I would heartily recommend it.