No one should ever mistake quietness for lack of presence or emotional power.
Case in manifestly resonant point is the 1981-set The Quiet Girl, written and directed by Colm Bairéad, which is matches the titular mood in just about every possible way – slow, thoughtful exchanges between characters, none of whom moves with much ferocity or speed (on the surface at least), long, achingly beautiful shots of the Irish countryside and meaningful glances that come weighed down with a lifetime of loss, pain and denied opportunities.
Still and ruminative it may be but that quietness of intent and approach belies a film that is roiling with all the emotional power in the universe, all of it contained in the taciturn countenance of nine-year-old Cáit (Catherine Clinch) who is sent by her poor and neglectful parents to live with her mother’s distant cousin, Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and her husband Seán, who run a dairy fun in beautifully remote Rinn Gaeltacht, County Waterford in Ireland.
With much of the film spoken in Gaelic, save for any scenes involving Cáit’s emotionally and socially careless father Athair (Michael Patric) who it seems can only speak English – by way of contrast, Cáit’s beleaguered mother Máthair (Kate Nic Chonaonaigh), there is a soothing otherworldliness to The Quiet Girl which takes us deep down into Cáit’s withdrawn world, one fashioned by neglect and gentle neglect rather than love and active emotional involvement.
She is matched, repressed emotion for repressed emotion by Eibhlín and Seán, each of whom react in completely different ways to Cáit’s sudden arrival in their lives.
Eibhlín begins as she means to go on when Cáit pulls up in her family’s battered car, carefully opening the door and greeting her new foster daughter with real love and affection.
It’s a touching scene, almost meditatively expressed, that establishes that Cáit has come to somewhere where she will be loved and cherished in a way she simply isn’t at home.
In one beautifully realised scene after another, Eibhlín bathes and feeds Cáit, who is dirty and malnourished, teaches her basic household tasks and ensures she gets to bed with all the love in the world folded into the tucking in of the sad and quiet little girl.
By way of contrast, Seán is closed down, barely speaking to Cáit and almost never acknowledging her presence until Eibhlín is called away one day and the newly minted foster father and daughter spend the time feeing calves milk and clean out the shed where the herd is milked.
This initiates a considerable warming of relations between the two who go on to have a close and loving relationship, one borne of an opening of hearts that characterises the slow burn renewal of The Quiet Girl, a film that appreciates that the biggest emotional moments of a person’s life often occur in the hushed slivers of the everyday.
As Cáit settles into life on the farm and is given the love, care and attention she’s long been denied – it must be said here that while her father seems actively uninvolved and uncaring about his large family, her mother is more world weary, the kind of mother who would love to be nurturing but whom life has rung out to a rag – she comes slowly alive, as do her foster parents, all of them emerging cautiously but eventually happily from their various moments of trauma.
Without spoiling what that trauma is for Seán and Eibhlín – it’s revealed to Cáit in a cruel way by a gossipy neighbour whose offer of babysitting is simply a disguise for the sort of grilling and sharing of secrets no child should ever have to endure – it’s safe to say that The Quiet Girl is one of the finest, most moving explorations of what grief, loss and trauma look like, and how, against all expectations, healing is possible.
Not easily, of course, and The Quiet Girl is careful at every point not to pretend that great emotional wrenching, the kind that can scar a person for life, can be healed with a wave of a wand, or more relevantly for this gorgeously, affectingly introspective film, a biscuit left without a word on the table or a shopping trip to buy new dresses and ponchos.
But healing is possible and as the powerful meditative splendour of this film unfolds, in quiet moment replete with epic emotions seeking outlet and redress, not all of which find their open wound needs answered or met, we come to realise that healing can come when you least expect it and in ways that don’t remove the wound necessarily but soothe and restore it enough that the business of truly living can begin again.
Based on Foster, a 2010 novella in English by Claire Keegan, The Quiet Girl is an immersively arresting story that never strays from the fact that life is hard and pain is inevitable but for all its cognisance of the brutal darkness of the business of living, knows that moments of light, hope, promise and love are possible and that they can salve the soul, however imperfectly, in effect or duration.
It is hard not to feel deeply for Cáit, Eibhlín or Seán, all lost at first in broken vulnerability, each of them searching for a new beginning, or if that can’t be sustained, simply some flicker of hope that life can be good again, or one lonely, sadly withdrawn little girl, can be good at all.
As films that dive deep into your heart and rip it out and then place it carefully and restoratively back in again, The Quiet Girl is a gem, a film that understands both the darkness and light of life and love, and how that is expressed for better or worse.
The Quiet Girl is filled with so much emotion —- SO MUCH —- all carefully and thoughtfully sowen into a film that’s as quiet as it’s protagonist but like her, filled with multitudes of longing, need and love, not all of which gets answered quite in the way anyone wants but which shows that that kind of love is possible and might be found again although we may never be party to it.