Director: Sinead O’Shea

Featuring: Jessie Buckley, Declan Conlon, Gabriel Byrne

Drawing on archive clips of Irish novelist Edna O’Brien, illuminating interviews with contemporaries and friends, and readings from her letters by actor Jessie Buckley, this documentary is an impressively rounded portrait of a charismatic and complex figure. The opening shows how at the height of her literary success in the 70s, O’Brien’s London house became a salon with a glittering parade of film stars dropping by. Then it’s back down to earth as the film traces her early formative life. O’Brien was born in 1930 in County Clare in a village where everyone knew everyone else’s business. As soon as she was able, she made her way to Dublin. She began an affair with writer Ernest Gébler and they moved to England. In 1960 O’Brien wrote her first novel ‘The Country Girls’ which was not only a critical success but caused a huge scandal in Ireland. As her career blossomed, Gébler became insanely and cruelly jealous. She eventually left him, and further commercial success followed with script commissions for Hollywood movies, and a series of affairs with ill-suited men. As well as some insightful commentary from Irish authors and O’Brien’s children, there is moving interview footage with the author as a lucid ninety-three year. Director O’Shea goes overboard occasionally with cliched newsreel footage of old Ireland, as well as some comically literal images – when O’Brien writes about being on the ‘high trapeze of the commencement of love,’ O’Shea illustrates the passage with actual footage of a high trapeze. But the picture is very good on the patriarchal gatekeeping in literary and society in general in the 60s and 70s. At ninety minutes it is by no means comprehensive, but it should encourage viewers to explore the writer’s work further.

David Willoughby

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