For three decades the London-based Irish artists Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor have ploughed their own furrow as theatre practitioners, installation creators and film-makers. In their most recent narrative feature, Rose Plays Julie, Ann Skelly’s ambiguous title character adopted a persona to investigate her biological parents; The Future Tense doubles down on that self-reflexivity with a long-form personal essay punctuated by photographs, asides, tangents and stage directions.
“Do you think we should make it clear that if it wasn’t for the pandemic, we wouldn’t be sitting here?” Lawlor asks early in the documentary. “That we had two proper actors booked in to play us?”
Two organising principles kick in early during this pleasingly meandering stream of consciousness: the flight from Stansted to Dublin, a journey that the duo known professionally as the Desperate Optimists have undertaken many times since they relocated from Dublin to London in the 1980s.
The second concept is borrowed from the essayist Rebecca Solnit: “In different places, different thoughts emerge.” So, as Molloy contemplates the life of Rose Dugdale, the Buckingham Palace debutante turned Provisional IRA volunteer, she wonders if her upbringing had happened farther north, in the middle of the conflict, might she “have taken up arms against the occupying force?”
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National identity looms large over The Future Tense, as it ponders such complicated cross-channel figures as the Kerry-born Lord Kitchener, architect of the Boer war concentration camps, and Lawlor’s parents, Helen and Jeremiah. Conceptually, it’s a far-reaching project that touches on a fear of flying, Patrick Pearse, Gena Rowlands, Sir Thomas Moore and the final image of Antonioni’s Blow-Up.
Lawlor explores his mother’s psychiatric records and finds the fitting phrase “I want to go home, but I don’t want to go back there” as he and Molloy return to Ireland, seeking a suitable home for themselves and their daughter, Molly Rose, who has an Irish passport but has never lived here.
Covid-related restrictions occasionally tell on a project that can feel more suited to radio. The device of interviewing remotely as Lawlor speaks to his brother Derry and other contributors, including the writer Kevin Barry, is jarring. Some of the jokes, notably an imagined conversation between models of Queen Elizabeth and Grace O’Malley at the Famine museum in Louisburgh, don’t land. Still, Lawlor and Molloy make for hugely likable company, and their gallimaufry of musings is as warm and witty as they are.
The Future Tense is on limited cinema release and on Mubi
