Irish Films 2

The small Irish-Jewish community has produced few internationally-known figures, although at least one became a successful film director. Dublin-born Norman Cohen (1936-1983) who died aged 47 in California, was the director of a series of soft-porn B-Movies such as Confessions of a Window Cleaner (1974) which nonetheless helped to define the zeitgeist of the Swinging Sixties in Britain. Perhaps another acclaimed cineaste is on the horizon….

Within a few hundred meters of where I live in Paris there stands the Irish College in Paris (Centre Culturel Irlandais ) founded in 1578. This is situated – where else – in the Rue des Irlandais, a street which itself does not appear to have changed much since the 16th Century - an admirable setting for a scene from Les Miserables. Irish Government–funded, from time to time they put on cultural events with an Irish slant, open to the public. Recently I noted that they were showing an Irish film, and since it was both free and a short walk – I couldn’t resist. And the Director no less would be present in person – and he had a name which I recognized – none other than Lenny Abrahamson, scion of two well-known Dublin families: Lenny’s grandfathers were respectively a respected professor of medicine, and the well-loved proprietor of one of Dublin’s last Kosher butchers.

The film “Adam & Paul” described a day in the life of two drug addicts in North Dublin. Paul was played by a wonderful young actor, Tom Murphy, already a winner of the Theatre’s greatest laurel, a Tony Award, who died tragically in his mid-thirties last October (2007). The screen writer was Mark O’Halloran who played Adam. The dialogue was bleakly realistic – I suppose – the first three words (or so) of the script being “F***! I’m f***ing f***ed” showing at least that this expletive is capable of great dramatic flexibility. Nevertheless, as Abrahamson explained in his post-screening talk, the authenticity was vouched for by several denizens of the North Dublin suburbs, who gave the film – which inevitably has a tragic ending – their thumbs-up. This first full-length film of Abrahamson’s has won several awards, and successfully runs the gamut from despairing misery to high comedy. My favourite scene has the pair failing to get a foreign gentleman to move along a public bench, whereupon they accuse him of being a “f***ing Romanian”. Outraged, he ripostes that he is a “f***ing Bulgarian”. In fact, this great comic actor is indeed a Romanian, and in real life the Romanian Minister of Culture, no less.

Thus encouraged by this sample of the Abrahamson oeuvre, I was moved to spend hard cash on his next effort, “Garage”, which was given full distribution in Paris. I was not disappointed. The same bleakness, the slowness of action, the hopelessness, … Well, it’s not exactly a laugh a minute. But this story of a somewhat inadequate but ultimately good man whose whole world is a two-pump petrol shack in the Irish countryside does indeed capture a mood which is not easily forgotten.

And that is the sign of a potentially great director.