La fille aux yeux verts

Bitter sweet tale beautifully adapted for the screen by Edna O'Brien from her own novel. It is a difficult subject. a young girl's infatuation with an older married man but the dialogue is so good it even convinces when you initially feel that a scene is unlikely to work. Her inviting him out to tea, her opening his bedroom door are prickly moments dealt with so well they seem perfectly natural. Rita Tushingham and Peter Finch are perfect in their roles and director Desmond Davis' light touch in the first of a short run of successful films ensures that there is almost something magical now and again. Of course, such a subject would be controversial anywhere, anytime but early 60s Ireland it must have been very much a no, no and the film does not avoid this. Indeed it confronts the hypocrisy of family and church very well including a devastating eulogy from the local priest which absolves men from just about anything, except the matter in hand. You can take a girl out of a convent but not the convent out of the girl, is the ardent hope of these primitive souls but perhaps no more as recently uncovered horrors have exposed even greater hypocrisy and criminality in the name of the Lord. In the end the film says more about the making and keeping or changing friends (and lovers) and is a surprisingly insightful outing.

Girl with Green Eyes seems typical of the period of British "Kitchen-Sink" drama films (I saw it as the 2nd part of a double bill with The Leather Boys and the theme being Rita Tushingham performances, though this is dialed down a little from that turn), and that's what's good but not terribly memorable about it all. It's realistic in some of the basic character interactions, though it has a bouncier/more emotionally-cued up score than the material should have, if that makes sense. It seems like a minor point but Desmond Davis clearly wanted to get a lot of emotional/romantic/tragic pull out of the music by John Addison, and it may have been too much for this lot of realism (how typical this is by the way, it's produced by Tony Richardson).

The story is actually an Irish-Kitchen-Sink movie, though with a couple of British touches: a young girl in Dublin, who originally was from a fairly lower-class farm that was highly religious but working *very* Irish class all the same, is working at a bookstore and finds that there's an author that she would like to meet along with her friend/roommate Baba. Peter Finch is this man, and soon Kate, the girl of the title, takes a real liking to him, and after not too long he to her. So they "hook up", so to speak, and this brings on problems, both external in force (he's technically married with a kid in another country, she's got pressure from her family not to have anything to do with this "Godless heathen), and more about the fact that it's a man who could be old enough, if only barely, to be her father.

This is a story explored in many kind of films, whether it's throw-a-dart-and-hit a Philip Roth story, or of course Manhattan. There's enough chemistry and charm between the two leading people as Tishingham, even dialed down, is delightful, and Finch does a lot playing usually-crusty and mostly sardonic/sarcastic speaking (if there had been a remake some years back I could've seen Alan Rickman in his role), plus Lynn Redgrave being wonderful and funny in her supporting place. But there's not much here that elevates it past its time and place; it's a perfectly fine drama, and it doesn't distinguish itself past some insights, which are only insightful up to a point, that you may need to grow as a person (or can never meet the other on the flipside due to losing "youthful vigor" as an aging man) to have a relationship work sometimes.

There's a nice, tender feeling to the film, Finch and Tushingham make a good pair on screen (precisely because we kind of know, deep down, it's not only not going to work but it can't not ever work, if that makes sense, so let's see them in the little moments) and that should work for anyone looking for that. Although some things that contribute to the 'hasnt-aged-terribly-well' is, say, when the film is edited so early on in their courtship Eugene and Kate talk and one part of a sentence begins in a new location and then another and another, and it feels distracting.

Desmond Davis, who had worked closely with Tony Richardson, decided to try his hand directing films. For his first effort he decided to use Edna O'Brien's novella "The Lonely Girl", which we read a long while ago, and frankly, we don't remember it well. The result was a movie that has that "English Look" of what came out of England during those years.

"Girl with Green Eyes" owes its success to Rita Tushingham, an actress that was the darling of English movie makers. She had a certain waif look that she used to her advantage in films such as this one, and in others of the same period. She holds the movie together as it's hard to take one's eyes from hers. Ms. Tushingham was not a spectacular beauty, yet she had a certain look that was appealing in her work.

Peter Finch appears as Eugene Gaillard, a man who is divorced with a child, and whose estranged wife has moved overseas. His attraction for Kate Brennan is quite understandable, yet, Eugene can't get Kate to be more than a platonic admirer, never being able to consume the passion she feels for him, and vice versa.

Also in the movie, a young and fresh Lynn Redgrave, who went to make bigger and better things on her own in the British cinema and on the stage and films in America, her adoptive country.

"Girl with Green Eyes" is worth a look for what Desmond Davis was able to accomplish in his first feature. The copy we watched recently was sadly in need of restoration.

This film is based upon the second volume of Edna O'Brien's "Country Girls" trilogy. That novel was originally published as "The Lonely Girl", but for some reason this was changed in the film adaptation to "Girl with Green Eyes", even though it was made in black and white so one cannot tell what colour the main character's eyes are. Subsequent editions of the book were also entitled "Girl with Green Eyes".

The title character is Kathleen "Kate" Brady, a naive young girl from the rural west of Ireland, who moves to Dublin, where she works in a grocer's shop and shares a room with her friend and schoolmate, Barbara "Baba" Brennan. (Baba is only a secondary character in "Girl with Green Eyes", but she plays a more central role in the other two episodes of the trilogy). Kate hopes to find a boyfriend, but she is shy and naïve and has less success than the more worldly-wise Baba. Eventually, however, Kate becomes involved with the middle-aged Eugene Gaillard, and it is their romance which forms the main subject-matter of the film. (In the original novel Eugene was a film-maker, but here he becomes a writer).

The age difference between Kate and Eugene is not the only obstacle in the way of their relationship. She is a devout Catholic and he a freethinker who does not share her faith. To make matters worse, he is married with a child. He is separated from his wife, but the two are not formally divorced. (At the period when the film is set, divorce was not possible in the Irish Republic; Mrs Gaillard, an American by birth, has had to return to her native country in order to obtain one). Kate's widowed father is horrified by the idea that his daughter is involved with a married man and he descends on Dublin with a group of friends, virtually kidnapping Kate and forcing her to return home, although at the first opportunity she can get she runs back to Eugene.

When the "Country Girls" trilogy was first published, between 1960 and 1963, it caused great controversy in O'Brien's native Ireland. It could be published in Britain but was banned in the Republic, and copies of the books were publicly burned. (It seems that the only freedom the Irish people had gained by secession from the UK was the freedom to be less free than their neighbours). It is therefore surprising that permission was given to make the film in Dublin and other Irish locations, even though it was made in 1964, only a hear after the final instalment in the trilogy had come out.

The film was, however, made by a British production company, Woodfall Film Productions, and the leading actors were all either British (Rita Tushingham as Kate, Lynn Redgrave as Baba) or Australian (Peter Finch as Eugene). Despite the Irish setting, it was made in the "kitchen sink" social-realist style popular in Britain in the late fifties and sixties. Woodfall had earlier made other films in this style, such as "A Taste of Honey", which also starred Tushingham, and "The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner", both directed by Tony Richardson, who acted as executive producer for "Girl with Green Eyes". The director, however, was Desmond Davis, making his directorial debut after working as a cameraman. .

At the time, the "kitchen sink" school was hailed as marking a new departure in British film-making, although the vogue for films of this nature was to be a relatively brief one, and did not really survive into the seventies (not, by any means, the most distinguished decade in British cinema history). "Spring and Port Wine" from 1970 can be seen as marking the end of the line. Nevertheless, that brief period saw some films of genuine quality and gave a voice to the British working class who had previously been neglected by the country's film-makers.

There are first-rate performances from Tushingham as Kate, a much more sensitive and vulnerable figure than her Jo in "A Taste of Honey", and from Finch as Eugene, a rather more sympathetic figure than he is in the book, a sophisticated, intellectual type who is at first flattered by the attentions of a younger woman, but who realises that the differences between them are too great to be easily overcome. "Girl with Green Eyes" is perhaps less well-known today than films like "Saturday Night and Sunday Morning", "A Taste of Honey" or "The Loneliness...", but I think it deserves to be better remembered.

Long into watching this studiously "small," slice-of-life portrait of a naive young woman, I was still wondering if the film would turn out, in the end, to have been worth watching. Earnest in its desire to be grittily true-to-life, in the neo-realist manner of the Angry Young Men, it is also clearly intoxicated with the quotidian lyricism and plain-spoken poetry of la nouvelle vague. It attempts to be charming and brutally frank at the same time, and manages, to some extent, to carry it off.

But will we end up caring about Tushingham's somewhat obtuse small town escapee, or Finch's sophisticated cold fish? Or will we be left with the rather sodden sensation that we've wasted our time eavesdropping on bores? For my part, I was pleasantly surprised. The story ends with the palpable sense that Kate has grown up a bit, and Eugene has grown a little older and sadder. We've looked on as two people have lived their bittersweet lives, much as we live our own -- and we're a little sad to bid them adieu.

To sum up: not as fresh and appealing today as it probably seemed in its time, but still rewarding and worthwhile.