Pavee Lackeen - La fille du voyage

Having read some rave reviews and comments on this film, I actually bought the DVD. What a disappointment. Has everyone been watching the same film. Nothing happens. A young traveler girl wanders from scene to scene, the non-narrative stretched to near breaking point. If anything, the style and technique are lifted straight from the Dardenne brothers film Rosetta, albeit without the gripping story and plot. What we have here is a con job, mutton dressed as lamb. This slight drama masquerades as social comment, but there is an uneasy feeling as you watch it that a middle-class professional fashion photographer could be accused of exploiting the travelers. I can only deduce that it appeals to other middle class liberals who want to get down with the tinkers, but who wouldn't lift a finger or inquire further on their behalf. Above all, it's boring. High point the mother's performance, low point the long shots where nothing happens. The piano music at the end says it all. Warning: Brendan Gleeson is not in this film.

A documentary-style snapshot of the life of a Traveller family in the docks area of Dublin. (Travellers are the Irish equivalent of Roma gypsies, but those two groups have entirely different histories.) A resilient mother and her ten children occupy trailers, or caravans as the Brits call them, on land owned by the local council. The film primarily follows Winnie, a ten year daughter, but the mother also plays an important role as she fights eviction notices and tries to improve the live of her children. Issues of discrimination, difficulties with the authorities and a social security net that, while well intentioned, can do little for the family are topics that permeate the film. Members of the family and their neighbors play themselves, while actors take up non-Traveller roles. The director should be commended for integrating professionals and non-professionals into a seamless whole.

A slice of life can be great cinema, because it can capture something that seems intrinsically real and tangible. Pavee Lackeen is funny and strikes me as realistic.

The film does not need an insertion of dramatic structure because I think it would then become contrived and false. The structure of the film is loose, but this definitely works. The focus isn't compromised, and as an audience we are compelled not by manufactured structure but by the rawness and reality of 'The Traveller Girl's' life (shaky, unsteady, boring, sad). Winnie and her family shine, a cracker of a film.

This is a 'slice-of-life' drama about a young traveller girl (Winnie) and her family in contemporary Ireland. Most of the (in)action takes place in a kind of lay-by next to a building site off a major road. You will probably forget that it is fiction - it's main characters are a real family and it is shot with a rough-and-ready documentary feel. Much of the dialogue is hard to catch and is spoken against a backdrop of traffic noise (probably as much a reason for showing it in the UK with subtitles as the issue of deciphering the accents). That said, there is visual poetry in much of the shooting (for example, the sequence where Winnie is ferreting around inside the Clothes Bin or where the girls go for chips).

The real strength of the movie is in what it refrains from saying: it scrupulously avoids sending a 'message' to anyone about anything. It simply presents - and is utterly convincing for that reason. The life is grim, but these people are not victims, they are not conspicuously persecuted by the authorities (the police and Council seem half-embarrassed to be issuing an eviction notice at the trailer door). Drink and solvent abuse and theft are presented more as the mere distractions of a daily routine rather than cause or effect. There isn't a lot to choose between teachers, social workers or even a traveller activist. These interested parties seem disengaged from the family's lifestyle and to be simply performing roles which barely impact upon the travellers' circumstances.

Although every opportunity for 'kitchen sink' plot development is thankfully eschewed, the trip to the standpipe for water which bookends the movie helps to suggest a cumulative worsening of the circumstances of the family.

I read somewhere that the director is influenced by the director Alan Clarke and you can see that. It has that directness of observation and honesty about human behaviour. Whatever, I look forward to the next feature by this director.

Let me say, straight away, that I am always suspicious of films that set themselves among the most under-privileged. There seems, for the most part some element of directors gazing down with virtuous intent from a great height onto these poor sods.

Pavee Lackeen suffers less than most from this syndrome, but it falls into the trap of thinking that a slice of life is the same thing as a slice of cinema. It isn't.

Two things stick out like a sore thumb in this film. The first is that it has no dramatic structure. We join the family of travellers on whom it focuses at, apparently, some random moment, some things happen, and then we leave them at another apparently equally random moment. On the way, have we seen character development? No. Have we been given any insight into the human psyche? No.

What we have had is a glimpse into the life of a young traveller girl, who is full of fun and life, and has lots of problems. We are sorry for her (we were probably that within five minutes of the start). We have learnt a few things about the way that travellers live in outer Dublin - but less than we might have by reading a well-written newspaper article.

At the screening I attended, the director, a nice man and former still photographer, declared himself to be in the line of film-making that came from Alan Clarke and early Ken Loach - that later Loach films, he thought, were too contrived. Hmmm. Yes. That says it all.

Here we have a naive belief that to film 'reality' without interference is art if that reality features the under-privileged. It isn't.

The director pointed out that it was shot on a minuscule budget (£320,000) - and, in fairness, he wasn't saying that this meant we had to make allowances.

It would be my belief that one of the most important things in a film is what is taken out. I don't mean edited. I mean that as much of what we see must be expressive and not confuse the viewer as to what each shot is about. Here, everything is cluttered and unstructured. I am not looking for 'beautiful squalor', but I am looking for some obvious attempt by the filmmakers to direct my eyes in a particular direction. I don't see it.

The 'acting' by these mainly non-professionals is fine. The archetypes created as characters are fine. But there is no structure and no visual strategy... that is, until the last shot, when the camera which has been jiggling about like a yo-yo for the rest of the film, is allowed to come to rest and in a single shot, say more about the plight of the characters than the previous 90 minutes - and for the first time, it uses non-diegetic music!! Great!