He Believes in Beauty
Neil Jordan's Latest Movie Ondine is a Superb Addition to the Oeuvre of Ireland's Finest Film-Maker, Who Professes His Love For Ireland's Innate 'Craggy Madness'.
Tara Brady, 22 Mar 2010
The Irish can take credit for a great many innovations and achievements — surfing, splitting the atom, saving civilisation’s bacon through centuries six to eight A.D. — but cinema, for as long as we’ve had such a thing, has often seemed beyond our capabilities.
Letters? We’re all over those suckers. We’re a nation of storytellers with nine Nobel Prize winners to our credit. Big elaborate squiggles down the margins of religious treasures? You better believe it. Movies? We don’t really do movies.
There are a million ancient hardwired reasons why. We can take it all the way back to the Bronze Age and speculate that visual arts have never really been our strong point. Our museums play house to robust, practical things – flat axes, daggers, pots – featuring few of the fruity embellishments one finds in, say, contemporary Iberian remnants.
We have, in our defence, produced the occasional internationally-renowned film director in a lineage dating back to Rex Ingram. We may even have delivered the odd cinematic visionary. Jim Sheridan’s Get Rich or Die Tryin’, a cash-in vehicle for rapper 50 Cent, is far from the director’s best work, but it’s difficult to think of another director who could have rendered Fiddy’s shower-stabbing scene as a mighty Grecian relief.
And then there’s Neil Jordan, a stylist you’d have to hike to Iran or Turkey to find the equal of. He, of course, is the exception that proves the rule. Where most filmmakers and artists have been happy to wallow in rainy realism, Jordan has struck out with fiendish Freudian fables and wicked legends.
“It might have something to do with my mother who was a painter,” says the director. “I always thought about things visually. It was certainly part of the reason I got into filmmaking in the first place. I perceived a lack there. It’s something that has always puzzled me.”
In stark contrast to the rainy realism that has become the Irish artist’s default setting, the Neil Jordan imprint is characterised by cerebral flights of fancy. Even when the filmmaker is not going head-to-head with imagined realms – think High Spirits, Interview with the Vampire and In Dreams – he’s kicking against socio-realistic tropes. Angel and The Crying Game twist political realities into fairy stories. The Butcher Boy and Breakfast on Pluto use grimy circumstance to explore identity politics and diseased dreamscapes.
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