Tadhg O’Sullivan, a singular experimental documentarian, admitted recently that he felt panic at moving into “drama film-making”. One can scarcely imagine a less panicky piece of work than this beautiful, puzzling reverie.
In truth, the jump from O’Sullivan’s documentaries to The Swallow is not enormous. Brenda Fricker and dog (a fine performance by Juno) pad along the shoreline. Her character speaks to an unknown correspondent. Occasional inserts, shot like home movies, take us to distant times and places. Glimpses of paintings such as Gustav Courbet’s The Stone Breakers chime with current surroundings and provide visual footnotes to meditations on the fragility of art. This is still recognisably the O’Sullivan adventurous filmgoers encountered in To the Moon and The Great Wall.
Sparse clues about whom the elderly woman is missing emerge slowly as she spills out her thoughts in a letter we suspect may never be sent. The missing acquaintance appears just outside the camera’s frame in an old photograph. The protagonist is going through ancient records – thinking she may not have much longer? – and settling a few old scores internally. Are the shots of Paris memories or expansions on the absent presence’s picture postcards? Either will do.
It is hard to imagine anyone else holding the screen as Fricker does here. It is a performance of great sadness and no little regret. That comes through in the gentle, rolling poetry of her delivery and the hooded, though still faintly defiant, face she pulls when walking the land or scowling at the crowded walls. A painter, she is as much concerned with the works that remain uncompleted as she is with finished successes. Another symptom of ageing?
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O’Sullivan confirms his skills in montage as he works in some surprising secondary media. The painter looks in the mirror and sees young Fricker from The Ballroom of Romance looking back. Late excerpts from the 1946 recording of Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, with Orson Welles and Bing Crosby, confirm the source of the film’s title.
While nobody could remain untouched by the beauty of the Co Clare landscape, some may baulk at the apparent lack of narrative momentum in this brief feature. Let it flow over you. The immersion brings rewards.
In cinemas from Friday, September 19th
