Emerald Isle Jewel : Maeve
I had to watch Pat Murphy’s Maeve (1981) a second time. And then a third. It’s formally challenging in addition to being politically challenging, as Northern Ireland’s first overtly feminist feature, bravely shot in Belfast at the height of The Troubles. If one is used to direct emotional engagement and linear storytelling, this is a challenging piece of work, but a rewarding one for those willing to bring themselves to it. Murphy eschews the more conventional and fashionable social-realist style of directors like Ken Loach. Scenes of incendiary ideological exchanges are juxtaposed with more disorienting and potentially alienating stylistic techniques. It can seem ungainly, because the audience is never on solid footing about the time period or some of the motivations of the characters but these ambiguities work for this type of film and its modernist flavor.
Those stylistic choices - both fanciful and jarring - break with tradition. There are interludes involving poetry. The fourth wall is broken. The same actor is cast in a series of emotionally similar toxic male roles. Flashbacks are interspersed without anything telegraphing them as such, or any style delineating them from the present day, so as to give them equal weight with the other material. They defy the idea of seeing history in the clear and linear way it’s traditionally been presented to us.
It’s a male history, one in which women don’t play a major role, and the film defies this reading of the struggle as a male one as well. Subjugation, sidelining, condescension; the hegemonic relationship of men to women is identical to that of England to Ireland. War and military occupation are cast as ongoing patriarchal projects, extensions of oppressive systems of dominance that serve to reinforce restrictive hierarchical structures.
It’s a blanketing oppression whose everyday tensions - the realities of security barriers, body searches, the presence of armed police and soldiers and their whims - highlight the sexual vulnerability of women living in these cities. The film sees these tensions vividly. The only power the women have within this struggle resides in the small moments of resistance they can get away with. Rebellions mostly of self-definition and resilience.
We jump around in the life of the intellectually curious Maeve (Mary Jackson). The film is set in three different periods of her life and Murphy’s film is careful never to privilege one timeline over the others. She cuts to scenes from Maeve’s childhood and schooling without any indication that this is the same character. The unannounced flashbacks are presented virtually unadorned. They’re not even like flashbacks in relation to the rest of the film, but rather separate storylines that can stand on their own. We’re given a look into the life of a young woman who left the small town of her upbringing to attend art school in London. Her reservations about leaving the struggle of her homeland behind become points to be reconciled when she returns to Belfast.
Upon returning, she finds that some people in her circle, including her boyfriend Liam (John Keegan) regarded her departure as a kind of betrayal of the Republican struggle. Murphy’s consistently intelligent, humane script and direction never put Maeve on a pedestal. We see the struggle from a female perspective, as we see what it must have been for a woman to grow up in a world of paramilitary violence and sectarian killings. We’re inclined to sympathize with Maeve’s decision to find her own freedom to discover herself and manage her own destiny. It may not have been the self-serving and egotistical choice her peers suspect, but one motivated by a lifetime of anxiety.
Still, there were consequences to this decision. Loved ones suffered. Maeve’s sister (Brid Brennan, who would become a legendary Irish actress) was left with the burden of caring for their miserable mother (Trudy Kelly). Murphy’s daring choice is to place the audience somewhere just shy of rooting for Jackson’s protagonist, respecting the audience by allowing it to put everything together and assess the meaning for itself.
Each of these timelines has its own pull and each has roughly the same dramatic weight as the others. One senses this balance was difficult to achieve. It takes a lot of confidence on the part of the filmmakers to produce images and a tone that are both assured and abrasive. You have to hand it to Murphy, her editor John Davies, her cameraman Robert Smith and her crew of fellow Royal College of Art film program graduates who secured backing from the British Film Institute to make Maeve. It was shot for less than £100,000 and the team utilized local actors from theatre groups in the area. That they choose to make the film this way is astonishing, and speaks of the full confidence in what they were doing.
The streets of Belfast look grimy and downtrodden. The act of walking them even in the daytime carries with it a paranoia about violent reprisals that might break out anytime. Something so simple as a walk home from a girls night out is shown to inevitably end in ducking and running from the nearby sound of gunfire. There seems to be respite from the threat of violence, no physical or emotional space in the community for a person to hide. The demeaning way the soldiers treat the women at checkpoints, using their command to get away with their dehumanizing behavior, are just some of the harsh realities of occupation. That it was all shot in the city where it was taking place in real life is simply extraordinary. Somewhat like the conditions of the Nazi occupation of France that were miraculously able to yield Marcel Carné’s masterpiece, Les Enfants du Paradis in 1945.
La Enfants du Paradis - (1945) dir. Marcel Carné
But it's inside the besieged state of the Republican Front that the women of the community feel truly powerless. Nationalist resistance must call upon the confrontation of centuries of colonization in its history as a means of legitimizing its current armed struggle. And yet, there’s no key role for women to play in the movement. They’re still seen as possessions or cheerleaders, with fates tied to what the menfolk still see as woman’s work (nest and brats).
Many of the movement’s men are weary and worn from the demands of such a resistance. Their unease is also given weight, and it contextualizes (without forgiving) their need to cling to these subjugative ancient hierarchies as an anchor to some sense of social order. Pushed into situations, people retreat back to outmoded social structures for comfort. Across three different timelines, Maeve repeatedly argues that traditional social models as places of refuge in tough times are still just functions of male privilege at their most unabashed.
Maeve and Liam share long, impassioned arguments about the state of things. Some critics found these scenes overlong or preachy but I think they’re highly instructive for getting a bearing on the discourse surrounding The Troubles at this point in its long history. The performances are uniformly naturalistic, committed and logical, so they never fall short as drama. Liam’s intentions are noble, and it seems he’s on the right side, but he simply has no idea how the Republican sidelining of women in the struggle for freedom affects them. Maybe these scenes were too contrarian in their confrontation of the prevailing orthodoxy to be taken seriously at the time, which is a shame.
Murphy, who went on to do similar historically-based dramas like Anne Devlin (1984) and Nora (2000), employs cerebral, distancing methods that have been described as “Brechtian,” and “Godardian.” To me, they’re a simple maverick’s response to standard storytelling methods befitting of the theme. Some of these scenes may drag a bit for some viewers but to see these concerns even being addressed at all in 1981 makes for a bracing experience, even if they remain firmly fixed within this milieu. It’s my opinion that films that seem the most “dated” are the ones that actually have the most to teach us about the respective periods in which they were made.
This is an amazing piece of work; dreamy, informative, strong. It’s a landmark Irish film. It informs with great passion and intelligence about what was going on in this part of the world that news footage and TV plays couldn’t get at from their comfortable distances. It informs about the era and the personal trials that live inside the political ones. The 2K transfer assists greatly with the visual detail of Smith’s cinematography, which highlights the bleakness and scariness of living in this world.
And all the time, the nervy, nonlinear storytelling method is like the first correction in a radical revisionist history. Murphy’s mature and strict observational policy means that the film can't be watched passively. Viewers must sort things out on their own, rather than be presented with a palatable, hand-wringing yarn that’s always dictating what should be felt about what and when. Just as history can’t be read merely as a progressive succession of events, so too can the struggles of that history not in the least afford to be populated solely by male hero figures, keeping half of their able and willing partisan comrades down.
Maeve is currently available on Blu-ray release from BFI and for streaming on MUBI.
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