Poitín

In a house scene the radio is turned on and a Gaelic Sean-nos singer is heard in the background as the scene unfolds. The background music in a way makes the location authentic.

The song on the radio was really from North Africa. Which leads into Bob Quinns thesis that the western islands have, among other, Islamic cultural roots.

He, in a sense, proved his point by default. It took me 3 or 4 reruns to realize that it wasn't a Sean-nos song.

The next question is to explore the West to East maritime influences. From this experience a simple "with us or against us" slogan misses the point of our interconnected origins.

Mícheál (Cusack) is an old poitín-maker, distilling illicit spirits near his isolated cottage. His resellers, the shifty Sleamhnam (Toibín) and his dull-witted sidekick, Labhcas (McCann) lose a consignment of poitín to the police, but daringly steal it back. Having told Mícheál that the bottles were lost, they see no need to inform him of their recovery and they pocket the proceeds of the sale for themselves. The fairly simple plot unwinds towards a somewhat predictable end, but it's not unsatisfying. The initial warmth and rustic cheeriness of the opening scenes is gradually replaced by a sense of menace, incoherent anger and hatred, showing the hardship of the lives of people in the West of Ireland at the time. The dialogue is entirely in Irish (Gaelic, not Hiberno-English) and in Cusack and McCann it's a chance to see two of Ireland's finest actors in rare screen perfomances. Worth a look.

Poitin has been digitally remastered and a new 35mm print produced by Framestore in London and Windmill lane in Dublin. A music score has been composed by Bill Whelan (composer of Riverdance). Originally there was no music used in the film - apart from one brief interjection of Arabic music from a radio. The new version was premiered this Summer at the Galway Film Fleadh (12th July 2007), exactly thirty years after the film was shot in Conamara. Niall Toibin, the survivor of the trio of imported actors (Cusack & McCann were the two others), was guest of honor. In September the film is to start doing the rounds of Festivals. A DVD of the new film will be made available soon. The old version is available from the Cinegael website.

After reading some of the caustic reaction to this movie from its debut in the 1970s, I had minimal expectations after ordering the DVD by mail order. But the film is actually quite good and authentic to a certain aspect of rural Irish life. Further, from a slow loping pace, it actually gets very tense and had me on the edge of my seat for the last portion of the movie. So it stands up as a thriller as well as a milestone for the Irish language.

I recently attended an Irish language conference that played Poitín as the basis of the advanced (for us) class. While we didn't play the film all the way through -- in fact, stopping often to review the dialogue as exercises -- the movie held up very well indeed.

Often, Ireland is used as a setting for fanciful stories involving comely lasses, hard-drinking but dear old men, and luscious scenery. The greatest example of this is probably The Quiet Man, which I adore, but there are many others and not all of American origin. Poitín, however, involves none of this, except for the hard drinking of the Irish moonshine called poitín (pronounced POH-teen, more or less). The film portrays an pre-Celtic Tiger Ireland that certainly looks more authentic than Finian's Rainbow, etc.

Micil, an old moonshiner, lives with his adult daughter on a hardscrabble farm mostly raising sheep but also producing a bountiful crop of poitín. He uses two shifty characters, fiery Labhcas and his dull-witted partner Sleahmnán, as agents or distributors to the local populace. The police are well aware of his activities but haven't caught him yet. Things go awry when a batch of the product is confiscated by the Gardaí then stolen back by the two agents, who decide to double-cross Micil.

There are no truly sympathetic characters in the movie with the exception of the publican, whose legitimate business is undermined by Labhcas and Sleamhnán. Everything is bleak -- the characters, the landscape, the weather, even the cinematography, which looks washed out, giving the film an older, sad feeling. Even the complete lack of a musical score contributes to the bleak mood. The acting is almost uniformly excellent -- Niall Toibin as Labhcas and Cyril Cusack as Micil, especially, both of whom appear on 'Ballykissangel' now. Mick Lally has a smaller role as a Garda sargeant, and he has appeared in films like Circle of Friends and The Secret of Roan Inish, as well as 'Ballykissangel', too.

In short, for its budget and production choices, an amazing film, and it's also amazing how many Irish speakers they used (in 1979!) and how many of them were solid actors. It seems like the Irish-language theatre is a great and mostly untapped resource. If you can get your hands on a copy with subtitles, a definite recommendation for film enthusiasts.