I recently watched the 2022 movie, The Quiet Girl (at Caldbeck’s CAFS film club) which, like Macbeth, ‘hath murdered sleep’, at least for a couple nights until I sat down to write this!

            I’ve often noticed that the shown stories of movies have more in common with the told short story than with the novel, and this one more so than most. That’s perhaps not surprising considering it’s based on the story Foster by ‘master’ short story teller Claire Keegan. Her collection Walk The Blue Fields (2007), set also in rural Ireland, bears comparison with George Moore’s 1914 landmark collection The Untilled Field which catalogues a bleak poverty that seems, a biblical lifetime later, to have changed less than might have been expected. There’s a genre of this type of writing, and not only from Ireland. Coppard, Bates and Mary Mann touched on it in their English  tales, and so do several European writers and Americans, especially of the deep south .

            The titles, of the short story/novella – I’m glad others have difficulty choosing which category to use – and of the film, tell us all we need to know: a quiet girl is fostered out to relatives and learns, as we do, about the meaning of family and of home.

            I have seen adaptation described as ‘streamlining’ stories. Sometimes that can seem like dilution, but it would be hard to believe that the heart-wrenching story of The Quiet Girl could be more intense in the telling than it is in the showing. I haven’t read Foster yet, but I will!

            I found it a very literary film. Shot in Gaelic and English (as spoken in southern Ireland), we watched it with sub-titles over the Gaelic. I didn’t quite get my ear in to the accent and missed some of the English, but I’m not sure that mattered. In fact, I’m not sure it wasn’t expected, because there were sequences where what was being said ran crystal clear, and where it didn’t the visuals carried the sense.

            The most telling statement in the whole film, for me, was where Sean, the fostering father of the eponymous heroine tells her, and us, that ‘many people miss the chance to say nothing’. It is a wonderfully convoluted, and powerful notion, and sits at the heart of this word-scarce movie. Nothing might be said, but we become very aware of what perhaps ought to be heard and acted upon.

            Only one character talks endlessly, and that it is a neighbour, who under the guise of friendship gets the quiet girl away from her foster parents for long enough to question her on how they are living. She also takes the chance to tell her, maliciously, the tragic backstory of the family. Yet this bit of nastiness has a positive outcome for secrets revealed allow issues to be confronted, and emotions to be released.

            The shown story, careful with what its characters tell us, is shown in a similarly careful way. Like a literary technique the film-maker’s language is of close cropped images, often showing only a fraction of the person whom we are watching, or listening to. The camera follows feet, legs, faces, but no more. But we, and perhaps more so than the characters themselves, see beyond what is shown, and understand what is not being said. The camera, unlike the voice, struggles to exclude, but anything we see behind what we are looking at carries the tale too: walls are bare; shadows lurk. When the rare scene opens up to a long or wide shot we notice it!

            This is a story of lack, not so much of money as of care, of sympathy and of understanding, and much of it centres on the two fathers: the foster and the natural.

            My first reaction to the natural father was to see him as an irredeemable villain, but as the story progressed I began to recognise that he too was a victim of his own lack, a sort of half-hearted narcissism, his shallow attachments to other women, to drink, to gambling. Around him a sort of torpor exists, in the lack of movement and interest of the other characters. It’s almost as if he stills life by his presence.

            The foster father is also an isolated, almost motionless figure to begin with, shown, standing on his own in the corner of the kitchen while his wife and the quiet girl eat at the table. But as the story unfolds he begins to move, and eventually to join the family to which he belongs. It is he who delivers that piece of wisdom which I believe to be the ‘one true statement’, in Hemingway’s words, that validates the story.

            The audience I was in sat in pin-drop silence throughout the screening, and wept openly at its ending. I would have been disappointed had it been otherwise.  

[Since writing the above I’ve read Foster, Claire Keegan’s originating tale. At 88 pages in my 2022 Faber edition it looks like a novella rather than a short story… but I’m inclined to look for structural definitions rather than merely wordcounts. And this has the feel of a short story about it: it’s tight, centred on a few characters and telling one story, more so, perhaps than the film is.

            I’ve long thought that the job of adaptation is not merely to save us from the bother if imagining what words mean, but to offer us a new interpretation. The Quiet Girl manages to do both, in the sense that it sticks very closely to the original, yet is nevertheless very different. I wish I could go back and read the story before I saw the film, and wonder if I’d be writing the same piece now were that possible.

            Keegan’s tale is written in the first person voice, and in the present tense, something a film can only try to do, but I’ve never seen one yet that fully works. Barry Lyndon, retelling Thackeray’s first person account of the eponymous hero loses almost entirely the sly revelation of his self-obsessed, whingeing narcissism, and, of course, shows him, as the camera must from the outside. The Quiet Girl cannot avoid doing the same. That first person voice has become the omniscient third person of the lens and the microphone. And while we’re on microphones, let’s mention that Keegan’s narrator thinks in English, reporting only the occasional Gaelic word. As a dabbler with the intricacies of Scot’s Gaelic I could pick out a dozen or more that I recognised in the parent language that the film presents. Why did they do that, I wonder? Was it connected to the storytelling? If it was I couldn’t see what extra it brought. Perhaps it was to do with funding. That’s not to say it spoiled the movie, and it certainly set it more firmly in a foreign country, from an English perspective…all to the good!

            There were other differences. The camera cannot help but provide descriptions, even when it’s tight on its subjects. The novella hinted at much that the camera plainly showed. A sentence of words, a headful of imaginings, but a screenshot of bare walls, of bored sisters; trees and sky passing above as the girl lies on the back seat of the moving car, only a line of print.

            The fathers too are presented differently, though with recognisably the same moments popping up: Sean – never referred to as such, as I recall, in the novella, but always by his family name; Da, the natural father hardly seen in the early stages of the told tale, but there to see from the beginning of the film.

            His ‘I’ve had a liquid lunch’ of the written story, becomes a scene of him sitting alone in a bar, drinking his beer. More significantly that enigmatic ending is quite different, and at the same time, exactly the same. Keegan gives us a short sentence, in which almost every word is open to interpretation; the film gives us glimpses and an intonation that’s unclear. What is being said, and to whom, and with what feeling remains something for us to ponder.           

Overall I found the ambience of Keegan’s story in a lower key. I want to describe it as ‘grey’ – a charcoal drawing of a story – though not to diminish it. But to what extent is that prejudiced by my watching of the film? I want to see that as turning up of the heat…not a dilution, but an intensifying of the story: bringing light, and warmth and sound to it. For the film is not shot in the suppressed voice and doubting mind of the girl Cait. The original story was not told in the all encompassing, but detached eye and ear of the movie camera. As is often the case with adaptations, I’d rather encourage you to experience both, and for their differences as much as for the one’s faithfulness to the other.]