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From the opening credits and beyond, the painful consequences of conflict and
consumerism are at the forefront in Joe Comerford's debut feature.
Neil Jordan's script (his first major screen credit) places his audience into
the shoes of Ireland's marginalised, much-scapegoated travelling people through
the fraught relationship between newlyweds Angela and Michael, pre-modern
innocents marooned in 1980s Ireland.
Comerford brought authenticity to his film by casting Irish travellers in the
major roles. In many respects, Traveller represents a transition in Irish cinema
from its experimental phase to the poetic realism of its maturity. Highlights
include Thaddeus O'Sullivan's saturated palette of morose greens and solemn
browns and the soundtrack (an often-ironic folk music medley provided by lead
actor Davy Spillane). Comerford punctuates the narrative with animations and
ethnographic inserts that depict traveller lifeways, anticipating the hybrid
documentary style of Perry Ogden's Pavee Lackeen (Eire, 2005), on a similar
subject.
It is hard not to read into Michael and Angela's forced marriage a 'state of
the nation' message: they are incapable of speaking to each other yet
uncomfortable within their own thoughts; when they do reach out, it is to lash
out, and Michael's ultimate profession of love is to murder his father-in-law -
a microcosm of the Troubles. It is their ersatz-priest, Clicky, an IRA-man
confused about his own mission (forerunner to Stephen Rea's Fergus in Jordan's
The Crying Game (UK/Japan, 1992)) who draws them into indirect conversation with
each other.
Clicky also provides the means for Devine's murder, perpetrated to a
soundtrack of Ulster violence (as shown on primetime television). Michael's
anticlimactic crime raises more questions than it answers, not least as to
motive - is this a political act against the father, or a fatal confusion of
love with retribution?
In Comerford's Ireland, not even patricide (a staple of Irish literature
famously lampooned in Synge's The Playboy of the Western World) can bring a
satisfactory resolution. Nor does a violent break with the past make it an
easier country to inhabit; in a typical Comerford ellipsis, all three
protagonists go abroad, leaving us with the chilling realisation that, for want
of any better alternative, Michael and Angela's mismatched marriage could grind
on much longer than healthier, more loving relationships.
Mitchell Miller
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1. An arrangement (2:08)
Original poster
