Sayles’s skill at grounding those truths in quiet, melancholic moments between grandparent and grandchild creates something truly moving. What makes the film work is how subtly and perfectly she plays the moment in childhood when you start to realize that your family’s history extends beyond the moment of your birth and begin to understand all of the deeper emotions that threaten to well up in your parents and grandparents. As Fiona begins a project of refurbishing old family cottages on Roan Inish that have fallen into ruin, she also learns more about the still open wound of her brother’s disappearance, as well as other family sorrows.įiona is played by the wonderful Jeni Courtney, an actor who made only two feature films and who won the role after Sayles auditioned 1,000 actors for the part. The secrets might reside on the mysterious isle of Roan Inish, where Fiona’s family used to live.
It’s family legend that Fiona’s ancestry includes selkies and that her younger brother, thought to be dead, was actually swept away to sea where he is currently being raised by seals. The film follows Fiona, a girl who goes to live with her grandparents on the coast of Ireland in the immediate wake of World War II. All of those films are varying degrees of great, but you wouldn’t look at any of them and think, “I should watch this with my kid.” Yet Roan Inish is a great movie to watch with a child who enjoys something slightly more contemplative than the usual kids’ fare. Sayles is a titan of American independent film, best known for movies like the 1980 “old friends reunite” drama Return of the Secaucus 7, the 1987 labor union historical drama Matewan, and a 1996 Western, Lone Star. Roan Inish is by far the more unexpected of the two films. However, it’s not about children coming to terms with their maturation and/or mortality, so it doesn’t count.) Moore lives and works in Ireland, and Sayles is Irish-American, so their interest in the selkie legend seems almost as much an exploration of their own identities as it is a good yarn to build a movie around. (The 2009 film Ondine also features selkies. The myth lives at the center of John Sayles’s The Secret of Roan Inish, a live-action 1994 film about a young girl searching for her long-lost brother, and Tomm Moore’s Song of the Sea, an animated 2014 film about a boy who discovers that his younger sister is a selkie. One day, finally, they will heed that call and return, leaving their loved ones sad to have lost them, but glad for their renewed happiness in the waves. In many stories, the selkie may change into human form and spend many years on land, even falling in love and having children, but always, the sea will call to them. People who can metamorphose into animals are a constant of folklore traditions around the world, but what makes the selkie tale such a good vehicle for coming-of-age stories is its inherent poignance.
In Irish folklore, a selkie is a seal who turns into a person and vice versa. There’s an even more consistently amazing subgenre within this subgenre: movies about selkies. The same coming-of-age beats that can feel heavy-handed in a more realistic treatment of these themes often feel refreshing and new when cloaked in the metaphors that fantasy or science fiction provide. to Spirited Away to Pan’s Labyrinth to the recent Petite Maman, stories about kids who encounter the unexplained seem like a foolproof way to tell stories about the uncertain transition from childhood to adulthood. There are few movie genres as frequently rewarding as “a young child gets wrapped up in some mystical bullshit,” especially when handled by a great director.
0 kommentar(er)
