(Claire Frances Byrne, 2024, Ireland, 84 minutes)
Claire Frances Byrne's directorial debut is a potent piece of work rooted in a specific place and time--with all the Irish slang you could hope for--and yet universal to the challenges teenage girls face, especially when it comes to teen boys. Even those who seem least threatening.
Katie (a very good Ruby Conway Dunne, looking for all the world like a tiny Andie MacDowell), a rebellious 13-year old, lives in a Dublin council estate. It's 1998. When her parents gift her with a pink bicycle, she spray paints it black, and never hesitates to talk back to the well meaning, if corny couple (Laurence Kinlan and Charleigh Bailey from Darren Thornton's A Date for Mad Mary, another fine film about a rebellious young Irish woman).
Summer has just begun, and Katie would rather hang out with the impetuous Danni (Molly Byrne), cynical Sarah (Alicia Weafer), and genial Stephen, aka Steo (Alex Grendon). She's known Steo the longest, and he shares her passion for football. He's been her best mate for years, but when his predatory cousin, Byrner (Lewis Brophy), encourages Steo to kiss her, and he does–with her consent–things quickly go further than she expected, leaving both her and Steo feeling confused and uncomfortable.
Katie tells Danni about the encounter and pledges her to secrecy, but their school mates soon finds out, and she's mortified. Katie assumes Steo spilled the beans, and gives him the cold shoulder. Unless I missed it, Lynn Ruane's screenplay never names the culprit, but when Katie describes her estate as a "fishbowl" at the end of the film, she isn't kidding--whether child or adult, everyone is up in everyone else's business. At least Katie has no siblings to complicate matters further.
If she isn't a model citizen, Katie knows she isn't ready for sex or alcohol, even if other kids, like Danni, try to convince her otherwise. One minute, the resident mean girls accuse her of being "fridget," Irish slang for someone scared or uninterested in sex, the next they accuse her of being a slut.
Worse yet, consent means nothing to Byrner, who represents a threat to any woman in his vicinity, but when David (Dane Whyte O'Hara), Byrner's better behaved mate, takes an interest in her, Katie doesn't resist. It's possible she feels she owes him after he gets her and Danni out of a jam, and it doesn't hurt that he looks like Chris Evans, but she isn't ready for what comes next.
If I wasn't thrilled that the director chose such a generic title, one shared by a popular horror comedy series--starring Andie MacDowell, no less--I can't say Ready or Not isn't fitting, since it sums up the theme of the film.
Katie is hardly an "idjit," as they like to say in Ireland, but nor is she as brave or as worldly as she pretends, and one good looking, smooth talker is all it takes to break down her defenses. (It's no wonder Joyce Chopra titled her devastating 1985 younger woman-older man film Smooth Talk.)
Though I don't usually gravitate towards coming-of-age stories, I wrote about the other two Irish films at the festival, so it only made sense to check out the third, and I'm glad I took a chance on this one, though I regret that it won't be shown with closed captions. You might think Dublin kids would be easy to understand, but I missed a few words. It was also helpful to look up the unfamiliar idioms.
I can't say I wouldn't have expected a narrative feature about a 13-year-old girl in 1998 to remind me of Blue Road, Sinéad O'Shea's profile of Edna O'Brien, except Katie recalls the writer, as a youth, in the ways she looks askance at alcohol, finds herself both attracted to and repelled by men, and longs to be seen as a multi-dimensional human being, rather than strictly as an angel or a whore, as if those were an Irish woman's only two choices.
If things were this bad for Irish girls in the 1990s, I shudder to think what they were like in the 1950s--and can only hope they're better now.
Ready or Not plays SIFF Cinema Uptown on May 21 at 9:30pm and May 22 at 4pm. Director Claire Frances Byrne is scheduled to attend. Images from the IMDb (Molly Byrne, Alicia Weafer, and Ruby Conway Dunne), Letterboxd (Dunne and Alex Grendon), and United Agents (Dane Whyte O'Hara).
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