(Sinéad O'Shea, 2024, Ireland, 100 minutes)
Documentarian Sinéad O'Shea (Pray for Our Sinners) presents Edna O'Brien as woman, mother, writer, and rebel. And not necessarily in that order.
Since O'Shea spoke with O'Brien several times in the months before her 2024 passing at 93, her narration combines the author's voice with diary readings from Irish actress Jessie Buckley, who first came to my attention by way of Tom Harper's Wild Rose (SIFF 2019). The effect is quite seamless.
O'Brien recalls that she grew up in a small town where she felt stifled. Her parents were not worldly or cultured people, and when she got the chance to move to Dublin, she took it, hoping to follow in the footsteps of James Joyce of whom she was a great admirer. It wasn't quite the done thing in the 1950s if you were a woman, but it didn't take her long to land a weekly column in a railway magazine (under a pseudonym)--and to take up with an older man, writer Ernest Gébler, thus scandalizing her conservative family.
Though many writers struggle with their first novel, O'Brien found the writing of 1960's The Country Girls to be "a pure joy." It would jump-start a literary trilogy with The Lonely Girl and Girls in Their Married Bliss, and lead to a 1964 motion picture with Rita Tushingham as the younger woman and a 1983 tele-film with Sam Neil as the older man--both directed by Desmond Davis--but her frankness about sex, drink, religion, and patriarchy would shock a staid country and lead to several book bans, and even, reportedly, a book burning. God forbid that an Irish woman might have sex–and enjoy it.
If the Irish public and pundit class found her work shocking, writers in the UK and the US embraced it.
Her success, however, made her husband insanely jealous, even though he benefited financially, and led to the end of their marriage. His comments about O'Brien during this time are truly horrific. What a sad, small-minded man, the kind who would--and did--abandon their children without a second thought.
As a single woman living in London with a bit of money and a lot of fame, O'Brien hobnobbed with the likes of Robert Mitchum and Marlon Brando, but she wasn't really a party girl or loose woman, as much as the press chose to portray her that way. She was, after all, always writing. O'Shea also includes excerpts from her vivacious talk show appearances. I got the impression that it was more about the media seeking her out than vice versa.
I also realized that the perfect person to play her in a biopic, in terms of both biography and appearance, would be actor/director/novelist Miranda July who has similarly striking light eyes, though blue rather than green.
O'Shea also covers several of O'Brien's works beyond the initial trilogy, including the Joyce-inspired 1972 novel Night and her final novel, 2019's Girl, a fictionalized first-person account told by a Nigerian schoolgirl, one among 276 kidnapped by the militant group Boko Haram in 2014.
In her film, O'Shea doesn't cover everything O'Brien ever did or said. She doesn't provide much information, for instance, about her plays, biographies, and acting work, but the director has done her subject justice.
Though an American could have made this documentary, and it wouldn't have been the worst thing in the world, only an Irish woman could really get her as thoroughly, and I felt the same about Kathryn Ferguson's 2022 Sinéad O’Connor documentary, Nothing Compares, which also avoids melodrama and hero worship in favor of an empathetic, yet evenhanded approach.
Neither film suggests that these uniquely talented women were without flaw, and their native country certainly did them dirty at times, but it made them who they were in all their fiery passion, poetic fury, and feminist glory.
Though SIFF has requested that critics save detailed coverage for the official film openings, this week I also watched Dea Kulumbegashvili's April, a searing film about a one-woman family planning clinic in rural Georgia, and Alexandre O. Phillippe's doumentary Chain Reactions, a multi-faceted exploration of Tobe Hooper's immortal Texas Chain Saw Massacre. I would recommend both, not least since Philippe, maker of essay films on Alien (SIFF 2019) and The Exorcist, will be in attendance on May 16.
Blue Road plays Pacific Place on May 16 at 4pm and the Uptown on May 20 at 6pm. I would also recommend Sheila O'Malley's insightful interview with the director. April plays the Uptown on May 16 at 1:30pm and SIFF Film Center on May 17 at 8pm, and Chain Reactions plays the Uptown on May 16 at 9pm and Pacific Place on May 17 at 1:30pm. Images from Broadway Cinema (Edna O'Brien in early years), the IMDb (Girl with the Green Eyes poster), Royal Literary Fund (O'Brien in later years), and Byrneholics Online.
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