Review: The Quiet Girl is a mature, measured masterpiece
The Quiet Girl is a measured masterpiece about a young girl whose patterns of survival, which have hardened into the cracks of her being like a deep frost, gradually thaw at the warmth and affection of two temporary guardians.
Living with her coarse family in a neglected and dirty cottage, nine-year-old Cáit, played with mesmerizing sensitivity by Catherine Clinch, is a reclusive child who slips away from her hectic, humiliating world as often as she can to dwell in nature. When her mother becomes pregnant with another child, the girl is sent to spend the summer with distant relatives: Eibhlín (Carrie Crowley) and Seán (Andrew Bennett). They live in a verdant, elegant paradise — a farmhouse, with cows and fields and real butter in the fridge; it might as well be another planet compared to what Cáit has always known.
During the few months she spends with this older couple, who appear to be haunted by some great loss in their pasts, Cáit blossoms into a healthy, radiant person — quiet, still, but cared for. And all three discover a love that salves their inner scars, inviting a new possibility of home to emerge.
Needless to say, The Quiet Girl is profoundly affecting (be sure to bring tissues to this one), and it is, in large part, because of the diligent, empathetic voice of writer-director Colm Bairéad. Working in the tradition of Charles Laughton’s The Night of the Hunter and Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Nobody Knows, Bairéad generates an acute and at times distressing sense of his protagonist’s vulnerability; much of the film is shot from Cáit’s vantage point, or in a manner that suggests it, so that Kate McCullough’s impressionistic cinematography presents the child’s environment with intimate specificity. Add to this a reduced aspect ratio and we’re left with severely limited or narrow perception — a sensibility that Bairéad enhances through dialogue, as there is virtually no exposition and we are left, like Cáit, to piece together what snatches of context we can to make sense of things.
But just as we witness these boundaries, they are countered by breathtakingly elegant tableaux within the frame. Resplendent greens and golds pour from the screen, swathing their audience in bucolic bliss, a study in summertime splendor. In particular, Bairéad and McCullough arrange a few shots that integrate Cáit into her surroundings, as if she and nature were one and the same: lying motionless under a sea of grass, rising from her repose like a meerkat poking its head up to scout for danger… or dipping a ladle into the placid, flat stretch of water at Eibhlín’s well, Cáit’s reflection undulating with a ribbon-thin streak of ripples. The creative team creates an abundant, calming dramaturgy of space that allows for Clinch, Crowley and Bennett to embody their respective characters with full emotional power.
This film is present for its actors, just as it’s present for things like sunlight and late afternoon breezes, that allows one to breathe. I can trust this, you think. I can let this guide me forward.
A movie of this maturity is startling to behold. Its clarity of vision is matched by intentional direction and superb technical craftsmanship. Nothing in its mise-en-scène is taken for granted, nor is there a ray of light or trace of noise that’s included without careful consideration. Like the bows of a tree rocking in a mild wind, The Quiet Girl sighs and sways its truth to those who are blessed with the instinct to sit still and pay attention.
