Just some quick thoughts (with no real spoilers) — my last post, the list of books I wish I had had time to read this year but am looking forward to next year, included Emma Donoghue’s Haven, but I’m having doubts…
So, listen. I will watch Florence Pugh in anything. I uncritically adore her. Yes, even when she’s doing a fake Russian accent (maybe even… especially when…). I have a huge crush on her, and she’s immensely talented, and she electrifies any scene she’s in. But even she cannot save this movie.
I couldn’t resist writing about it because I googled a few reviews after watching to see what critics thought, and the thing I saw repeatedly was, ‘this would be a terrific movie, except the semi-pretentious framing, and its choice to break the third wall.’ I felt compelled to add my two cents here, which is that the framing is not the problem. In fact, the framing is an effort to SOLVE the problem. I’m not saying it’s a good solution, but it serves a key purpose; namely, it’s there to attempt to persuade you that the movie is at least nominally on the side of the rural Irish Catholics it portrays, and invested in how they understand the story.
It has to do this, you see, because otherwise, it will seem like a movie about an Englishwoman who has come to a savage outpost of the colony to save an innocent child (haven’t you been posted to the Crimea? they ask her at one point. And yet you find us barbaric? Why yes!!*). And all the bright colors of the scenery will simply heighten the exoticism of the dour, spooky peasantry.
I am told that the novel has nuance. I can sort of imagine it. There is some potential for complexity here, in the story of a child who miraculously survives without eating, and the various investments that people have in her. There is some interest in thinking about what the wonder of starvation means in a place that is still reeling from the effects of famine — and, on a meta-level, we might say, there is some interest in thinking about the silences around the Famine, and the work of cultural memory that contemporary fiction and film can or should do.
Unfortunately, the movie cannot sustain that level of nuance. And this is probably, sad to say, because Florence Pugh is just so magnetic that her perspective irresistibly dominates the film. She is (to my eyes at least), enthralling enough that one can simply ignore her poorly sketched out backstory — which is perhaps meant to add moral complexity, but actually only succeeds in making her more sympathetic. You inevitably find yourself occupying her perspective, and the film can’t help but encourage you to do so.
In fact, the only thing the movie really does in relation to the woman who is meant to be the ‘native’ informant is to repeatedly remind us that she is barely literate, which is perhaps intended to evocatively gesture to a memory that cannot be preserved, because it is unwritten? This would be far more persuasive if the film used the affordances at its disposal to actually give us a sense of her perspective, and what all these events meant to her. But the only thing we get from the local Irish side is a much darker view, an evil and cruelty that needs only be vaguely hinted at for us to pick up the hint. The emigre-returned-home who could be a bridge between the two worldviews is a complete cynic.
So ultimately, you get a movie that starts off at least semi- interesting, a kind of spiritual mystery-thriller, and then takes a turn into…colonial paternalism. With a half-hearted gesture towards relativism, via an earnest invocation to remember that people believe different things.
What a waste of talent.
*I obviously can’t resist noting that this is yet another example of the casual alignment between Eastern and Western peripheries of Europe…
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