Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Robert Higgins, Patrick McGivney
Starring: Éanna Hardwicke, Danielle Galligan, Lorcan Cranitch,
Dafhyd Flynn, Dara Devaney, Gary Lydon
Ireland's most popular sport, Gaelic Football, attracts some of the
biggest sporting crowds in Europe, yet even at the top level the
majority of players take part on an amateur level, essentially balancing
their day jobs with their sporting profession. At the lower county level
it can often be taken just as seriously, with small towns and villages
centering their community around the local team. A young man might have
to be up at dawn to milk his farm's cows, but if he's a footballer he'll
have to get up even earlier to get some training in before he sets about
his day job. While there are no financial rewards, if you do well you'll
become a local hero who never has to pay for a pint in the village pub.
This can have its downside, with the pressure of an entire town weighing
on the shoulders of a young man.
Lakelands, the debut feature of writer-directors Robert Higgins and
Patrick McGivney, is centred on just such a figure. In his
mid-twenties, Cian (Éanna Hardwicke) is either living a contented
life or is stuck in a rut, depending on your point of view. He enjoys
working alongside his father Diarmuid (Lorcan Cranitch) on the
family farm, playing for the local Gaelic team, and getting smashed on
the weekend, and somehow he's managed to balance all three.
Cian's routine is disrupted when he takes a beating outside a
nightclub, leaving him with what he initially believes to be minor head
injuries. A check-up reveals that he's suffering from concussion. His
doctor advises him to give up football, drinking and working on the
farm. Of course, being a stubborn Irish male, Cian ignores the medical advice
and tries to continue on with his ways. He's only fooling himself
though. Unable to rely on his son, Diarmuid employs a replacement for
Cian, who is similarly replaced in his team by a rising youth team star.
All that's left for Cian is drink and drugs.
Cian's path to self-destruction is blocked by the return of an old
sweetheart, Grace (Danielle Galligan, something of an Irish
Sharon Stone), who left for London eight years ago and is back to tend
to her dying father. While he's unable to discuss his health issues and
the resulting fears for his future with his male peers, Cian is more
comfortable opening up to Grace, who displays a maturity he and his
friends have yet to reach. Grace lets Cian know from the off that she
has a boyfriend back in London and that there will be no rekindling of
any past desires. Cian says he's fine with that, and while initially
he's probably fooling himself, he comes to value her as a friend.
Platonic relationships between men and women are rarely portrayed on
screen, yet when done well they can be more charged than romantic
couplings. That's the case here, and while we grow so fond of Cian and
Grace that we might root for them to get together, at the same time we
hope the movie is more honest in its intentions. While they might look
cute making googly eyes at one another, relationships require a lot more
than mere attraction, and sad as it may seem, these are two people who
are really poles apart in their life trajectories. Or as Cian puts it,
in small town Ireland there are two types of people, those who stay and
those who leave.
Lakelands is an Irish cousin of Chloe Zhao's first two
movies,
Songs My Brothers Taught Me
and
The Rider. Like the latter it's about a young man forced to adjust to an
uncertain future due to an injury. As with the protagonist of that
movie, Cian feels like he owes his community his sporting presence, and
also feels the pressure of their hopes and dreams. Cian is unable to
express his fears verbally, keeping everything bottled up and pretending
it's all "grand." It's a very Irish mentality that makes for very
cinematic storytelling. Irish people rarely verbalise what's on our
minds, so it's up to a filmmaker to use imagery to convey our
psychology. Hardwicke and Galligan do a fine job of masking their
respective troubles while kidding about with one another, but we can
read their faces and see what they're really feeling. Hardwicke
shoulders the bulk of the movie, appearing in every scene, and by the
end we feel like we know Cian better than he might know himself. While
given less screen time, Galligan is equally impactful, particularly in a
scene where she arrives on Cian's doorstep ostensibly for a chat and a
cup of tea, but we can see a trembling in her eyes that Cian can't pick
up on because he's too busy feeling sorry for himself.
Like Zhao's Songs My Brothers Taught Me, Lakelands is about a young man who resists the pressure to leave his
community because as primitive as it might seem from the outside, it's
his home, and where he feels he belongs. Much of
Lakelands can make life in rural Ireland seem like a
monotonous drag, reliant upon the distractions of sport and alcohol to
get through another week, but occasionally the film will pause to
observe Cian as he looks over land and lakes and takes in their beauty,
breathing deep breaths of clean country air perfumed by cow shite. Sure
it could be worse. As Jaws' Chief Brody wisely put it, it's only an island if you look at it from
the water.
