It's ironic that, when I was younger and knew nothing, I used to imagine Ireland as this merry land of jolly folk songs and people peacefully getting drunk on ale just to sing and dance to those songs, and maybe to write a few more.
It's equally ironic to recall how this naive image was shattered. Not through learning the history of English occupation. Not even through learning about The Great Hunger. It was through observing images of those patchwork fields on the slopes near the shore. With nothing but grass around, not a single tree. And those stone hedges that weren't even meant to demark land owned by different people, but rather to protect this already almost barren stony soil from eroding even further and just leaking and blowing into the ocean. It was the epitome of hopelessness and some kind of quiet realisation, that there's no solution here, and this is how things will remain. With no promise of any happy ending, or happy beginning or being for that matter.
Those fields. It was enough to have a single look to feel this anguish. Stuff that makes village people drink themselves to death or find quicker ways of reaching the same bitter end.
The Banshees of Inisherin manages to do what I didn't think was possible. It amplifies this feeling, makes it take shape, almost turns it into something palpable, and delivers it right into your core so that you shiver even if you're thousands of miles away from those bare windy shores. And it does all that through another unparalleled trick. The vessel that carries this heavy spirit is not some huge riveting conflict. But rather its polar opposite. The most minuscule thing imaginable. A story of one man becoming boring for another one.
We are so used to attaching strong emotions to strong stimulation that at first this film feels deafeningly underwhelming. It is so silently uneventful that you might decide that you just lost your hearing. Yet it's through this eerie quiet that we start hearing things that we didn't even know existed. What once looked dull and bleak now turns into a cacophony so loud that one would literally need to distract themselves with pain to stop hearing it.
It's not a problem when your friend is dull if you are surrounded with shiny bright sources of cheap stimulation, like all of us are in this modern ever-connected world. But what if your whole universe contracts to a small patch of land with a small group of people on it, desperate for novelty but so used to that desperation that suppressing it becomes a national character? How do you convince yourself that you're still alive, and, even if you are, that your life has any essence and value at all?
With only what the life of a small Irish settlement could provide, Martin McDonagh creates something that's at the same time a Boschian pandemonium and a frozen circle of Dantean hell. Where everything moves and talks and bleats at once, but nothing really happens and nothing really matters. In a way, your only hope at sanity is your own blindness and deafness. But once you un-dull yourself, existence becomes a race against time and things that don't push you forward pull you down instead.
All this ambiguous and quite nutty complexity is tough to coherently put into words. But the power quartet of Colin Farell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan make this almost religious revelation entirely visceral. Through those quite simplistic facial movements these people let us in on the horrors of being trapped inside the routine, feeling brutally lonely while among people, and just suffocating with the mundane and the transient. You could feel it so close that the shattering experience of watching TBoI isn't even in its gory moments (although those are awfully disturbing), but in the despair of sitting next to a person you hold dear - yet knowing that there's a wall between you that can't be overcome, and just crying helplessly.
I'm not sure of the film offers any sensible amount of hope at the end. Can redemption be achieved simply via suffering? Does a symbolic sacrifice of one life breathe in life into someone else, so robotic and predictable that they could just as well be dead? And if it does, is there a single chance for this newly found life to have a semblance of, if not meaning then at least value? There's no way to know that. Because, sated with this ritual suffering, banshees are silent now, they sit back, amused, and observe. And all we can do is follow suit.
It's equally ironic to recall how this naive image was shattered. Not through learning the history of English occupation. Not even through learning about The Great Hunger. It was through observing images of those patchwork fields on the slopes near the shore. With nothing but grass around, not a single tree. And those stone hedges that weren't even meant to demark land owned by different people, but rather to protect this already almost barren stony soil from eroding even further and just leaking and blowing into the ocean. It was the epitome of hopelessness and some kind of quiet realisation, that there's no solution here, and this is how things will remain. With no promise of any happy ending, or happy beginning or being for that matter.
Those fields. It was enough to have a single look to feel this anguish. Stuff that makes village people drink themselves to death or find quicker ways of reaching the same bitter end.
The Banshees of Inisherin manages to do what I didn't think was possible. It amplifies this feeling, makes it take shape, almost turns it into something palpable, and delivers it right into your core so that you shiver even if you're thousands of miles away from those bare windy shores. And it does all that through another unparalleled trick. The vessel that carries this heavy spirit is not some huge riveting conflict. But rather its polar opposite. The most minuscule thing imaginable. A story of one man becoming boring for another one.
We are so used to attaching strong emotions to strong stimulation that at first this film feels deafeningly underwhelming. It is so silently uneventful that you might decide that you just lost your hearing. Yet it's through this eerie quiet that we start hearing things that we didn't even know existed. What once looked dull and bleak now turns into a cacophony so loud that one would literally need to distract themselves with pain to stop hearing it.
It's not a problem when your friend is dull if you are surrounded with shiny bright sources of cheap stimulation, like all of us are in this modern ever-connected world. But what if your whole universe contracts to a small patch of land with a small group of people on it, desperate for novelty but so used to that desperation that suppressing it becomes a national character? How do you convince yourself that you're still alive, and, even if you are, that your life has any essence and value at all?
With only what the life of a small Irish settlement could provide, Martin McDonagh creates something that's at the same time a Boschian pandemonium and a frozen circle of Dantean hell. Where everything moves and talks and bleats at once, but nothing really happens and nothing really matters. In a way, your only hope at sanity is your own blindness and deafness. But once you un-dull yourself, existence becomes a race against time and things that don't push you forward pull you down instead.
All this ambiguous and quite nutty complexity is tough to coherently put into words. But the power quartet of Colin Farell, Brendan Gleeson, Kerry Condon and Barry Keoghan make this almost religious revelation entirely visceral. Through those quite simplistic facial movements these people let us in on the horrors of being trapped inside the routine, feeling brutally lonely while among people, and just suffocating with the mundane and the transient. You could feel it so close that the shattering experience of watching TBoI isn't even in its gory moments (although those are awfully disturbing), but in the despair of sitting next to a person you hold dear - yet knowing that there's a wall between you that can't be overcome, and just crying helplessly.
I'm not sure of the film offers any sensible amount of hope at the end. Can redemption be achieved simply via suffering? Does a symbolic sacrifice of one life breathe in life into someone else, so robotic and predictable that they could just as well be dead? And if it does, is there a single chance for this newly found life to have a semblance of, if not meaning then at least value? There's no way to know that. Because, sated with this ritual suffering, banshees are silent now, they sit back, amused, and observe. And all we can do is follow suit.