Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Christine Molloy, Joe Lawlor
Starring: Imogen Poots, Tom Vaughan-Lawlor, Lewis Brophy, Jack Meade, Patrick Martins, Dermot
Crowley, Andrea Irvine
The most dangerous revolutionaries are those who adopt a cause on someone
else's behalf: the white Islamist, the middle class communist, the
Westerner who heads off to Ukraine to kill Russians. Such people often
feel they have to prove themselves, which makes them willing to commit
extreme acts. There's also the hot-blooded passion of falling in love with
a new idea, which can cloud the mind. With Baltimore, the filmmaking partnership of Christine Molloy and
Joe Lawlor explore this idea through the figure of Rose Dugdale, an
English heiress who joined the IRA in the early 1970s.
A non-Irish filmmaker of a left-wing bent would probably portray Rose as an unambiguous heroine, but Molloy and Lawlor are Irish filmmakers of
the generation that saw Ireland gradually turn against the atrocities
committed in their name, that saw a freedom movement increasingly hijacked
by cold-blooded criminality. As such, whether fairly or unfairly, Rose is portrayed here as a well-intentioned but misguided interloper with the
potential to cause harm to the very people she claims to be fighting for.
Even if you support the team, it's difficult to get on board with this
particular captain.
The movie is centred around the most famous chapter of Rose's brief
career as a Republican revolutionary, the raid she undertook with three
male IRA members on County Wicklow's Russborough House. Rose and her
gang stole paintings whose value amounted to the most significant art
theft in history. The plan was to blackmail the authorities into releasing
interned Republican prisoners with the threat of destroying the
paintings.
When Molloy and Lawlor initially conceived of bringing Rose's story to
the screen, they can't have foreseen how timely it would become. The news
is now filled with stories of pieces of art being attacked by political
activists, whether it's statues of controversial figures being toppled or
masterpieces being smeared with cans of tomato soup. It's raised a debate
on the value of art and whether it can justifiably be targeted. Rose
declares that despite her expertise of art, she's more than willing to
destroy the plundered paintings if her plan doesn't work out. Her less
educated companions seem more upset by this idea, especially one young man
who has been exposed to such art for the first time through the heist.
Rose later becomes extremely annoyed when her actions are rejected by the
imprisoned IRA members on whose behalf she believes she's working. In a
statement read out on the radio, the prisoners ask Rose to return the
art, as they believe the world is a better place for their
existence.
Rose can't see art in such terms because she views the paintings as a
commodity, something to be treasured rather than experienced. She would
rather destroy them than have them remain on view to the Irish public. As
a child we see how she was surrounded by such artworks and thus took them
for granted. It's a contrast to how her IRA colleagues view the paintings
with inquisitive wonder. When they ask Rose about certain details of the
paintings, her replies suggest she's repeating academic interpretations
rather than her own feelings.
This favouring of cold reason over emotion fuels the film's most tense
subplot, as Rose debates over whether she should kill an elderly local
farmer who may or may not have identified her. The irony of killing an
Irishman seems lost on her, as does her disdain for Catholicism. She
believes she's acting on behalf of the people of Ireland, but few in 1970s
Ireland would have wanted to be represented by an English atheist. This
theme of an outsider activist doing more harm than good for the people
she's acting for is mirrored by a flashback that sees a young black man's
life ruined when he's caught aiding Rose in stealing from her own home -
she walks free while he gets nine years in prison. The Irish men in Rose's
IRA cell may refer to her as "comrade" but it's clear that for all her
communist sympathies she doesn't regard them as equals, and you can almost
imagine Rose silently muttering about "ungrateful Paddies" at several
points when reality gets in the way of her fantasies about armed
activism.
Imogen Poots is fantastic in the role of Rose. As we watch her
transform from a teenager striking out against chauvinism and the class
system to the cynical thirtysomething pointing a gun at the back of a
farmer's head, the growing deadness in Poots' eyes embodies Rose's
unquenched thirst for revenge against the indifference of her parents to
their privileged position, leaving us in little doubt that Rose's activism
is fuelled more by personal rebellion than political revolution. Equally
excellent is Dermot Crowley as Donal, the farmer who finds his life
threatened by Rose. His face is a picture of innocence, representative of
the unwitting victims of conflicts they don't understand but which arrive
on their doorstep nonetheless. The tension is aided by
Stephen McKeon's score, whose discordant drum beats sound like the
march of an army that's gotten off course. It's reminiscent of Bernard
Herrmann's score for Taxi Driver, as is the out-of-body sequence that closes Baltimore. Like Travis Bickle, the Rose Dugdale portrayed here is a rebel who
picks a cause to satisfy their own grievances. She's a freedom fighter,
but the question is whose freedom she's really fighting for.
Baltimore is in UK/ROI cinemas
from March 22nd.
