For any Irish native born after the 1960s, the bog-standard indigenous movie, invariably depicting some poor soul growing up in repressed holy Catholic Ireland under the tyranny of hurley-wielding priests and small-minded yokels, held all the relevance of the Battle of Clontarf or the potato blight. And yet, up until very recently, nearly every film produced here either slavishly followed said template, or else cobbled together a series of baffling half-arsed visual metaphors and tried to pass them off as ‘art cinema’(All Souls’ Day, High Boot Benny etc.)
Well, no more. The last few years have witnessed an undeniable increase in the quality of native output, with Irish directors not just making tentative steps towards successful genre film-making (I Went Down, Accelerator) but also apparently finding ways to accurately convey the national capacity for dark wit and myth-making.
Intermission – written and directed by first-timers with a theatre background – continues this healthy trend, with a host of capable actors playing out a very lively script which cuts neatly back and forth between several interwoven stories, encompassing fifteen central characters in Short Cuts-inspired fashion.
Colm Meaney and Colin Farrell head up the somewhat over-populated cast, with Meaney clearly enjoying himself as an ill-tempered cop, while Farrell plays an equally psychotic thief. There’s also a film-maker, a bank manager leaving his wife for a younger model (Kelly MacDonald) who’s still worshipped by her ex (Cillian Murphy) who’s fallen in with the wrong crowd, not to mention the bus-driver, the abandoned wife, the moustachioed (female) teenage outsider and the supermarket slave-workers.
It’s ambitious stuff, and not all of the plot-lines hang together as effortlessly and coherently as they might, but even the film’s more forced passages (with occasionally awkward dialogue) are redeemed by spirited acting.
All in all, a film which holds out hope for the future of Irish cinema.