Irish Cinema: "Garage"

It's not so often that I see an Irish movie in the cinemas here in Paris. Much longer than I remember. So it was with interest that I went to see "Garage", a film by Lenny Abrahamson and starring the well-know Irish actor Pat Shortt, which opened here last week.

The plot is minimal: Shortt plays Josie, a simple-minded petrol station attendant deep in Ireland. It's very much a film in that favourite genre of mine, the "Inaction movie". His service station is a fossil, a museum of 1950's Ireland. Shortt lives in a dingy room in back and spends his evenings either at the small pub in town (where a few of the clients are needlessly cruel to him) or staring out across the fields. The station's owner, we are told, is content to let it decay because he knows that it will only be a matter of time before it will more interesting, financially, to bulldoze the site and build houses. This is, after all, the new Ireland. One morning the station's owner arrives with his girlfriend's son, who is to help Josie at the station.

Josie has been working at this garage for a very long time, and has dug a very deep hole of solitude for himself out in the fields where his garage is. He is desperate to make friends, to strike a bond with someone, but he just can't communicate what he thinks, and no-one really takes the time to listen to him. He is relentlessly cheerful and friendly to everyone, regardless of what they tell him. Josie develops a bond of sorts with his new assistant, but all does not work out well.

I was reminded me of Patrick Kavanagh's lonely farmer in that classic of Irish poetry,"The Great hunger", condemned to spend the rest of his life staring at the field across the road. The countryside around Josie is beautiful and desolate in a very Irish way. You see, these fields and hills do not speak. There are no swathes of great open spaces inviting freedom and liberty here: this Irish landscape is very different from the one which Sean Penn's wild-eyed seeker-after-truth experienced in "Into the wild" which is currently filling up the cinemas here in Paris. Instead, the flat level fields and shimmering lakes (all beautifully filmed) have a horizon which is foreshortened and proximate.

The film's dominant register is a very subdued, tragicomic one, and the story proceeds relentlessly from one event to the next to the film's inexorable conclusion. Everything is presented in an unaffected, ultra realist way. I thought a little of Aki Karismaki's miserablist classic, "The matchstick girl" but the difference here is that Josie doesn't fight back. I felt relieved to leave the cinema and find myself once again surrounded by the streets and buildings of Paris.

Some thoughts on Orhan Pamuk's "The black book"

In Ireland I finished Orhan Pamuk's epic novel of Istambul, "The Black Book". It's long and dense book, and it required a great deal of concentration. The wilds of Ireland is really an ideal place to read it. It had taken me almost two months of Parisian time to reach the half-way mark: in a week in Ireland I finished it.

I'd bought on a recent trip to New York because I realised that most novels I'm reading these days seem to be by authors I've already read. Not too experimental, that! Pamuk, winner of the 2006 Nobel prize for literature, seemed to be an interesting writer, so I thought I would give his book a spin.

There is only really one theme in the book, identity, which I understand is a typically Turkish concern. I can understand that, living on the frontier between East and West, Asia and Europe. (Istambul/Constantinopole/Byzantium has always fascinated me, in fact I made several fruitless attempts to memorize W. B. Yeats' wonderful and incomprehensible poem about that city, and I have always been interested to visit there, but I haven't had the chance so far). In Pamuk's book, everyone is trying to be someone else, is switching identity and place. The principal character spends the entire book searching for his friend and his wife, who aren't there, who are absent, who never show up, and before the end of the book he actually assumes his friend's identity and begins to write his famous newspaper column for him.

The book is full of similar stories of blurring of identities. The real scale of the book are stories of a few pages in length, and there seem to be hundreds, some more fantastic than others. Of an enormous underground city beneath the streets of Istanbul filled with mannequins which are flawless copies of real people. Of an old journalist who, confined to his flat, finally convinces himself that he is Marcel Proust and he is living inside his novels of Proust, and is forever waiting for his sweetheart to return. Of the prince who wants to write only that which is "real" and "true" and which speaks from his inner self; to do this he destroys his library so that these books might not possibly influence him, he strips to furnishings from his house so that his thoughts might be uninterrupted by such distractions. Isolates himself. Returns to zero. Speaks to no-one.

The book's ending is cruel and shocking. I understood, too, why Mr. Pamuk is sometimes less than popular with the Turkish authorities. There is a perhaps a little too much X-ray vision in his picture of Turkish society....

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