If someone dramatised the grimmer stories at the centre of Sinéad O’Shea’s fine documentary on Edna O’Brien – and maybe someone should – there would, no doubt, be letters to the paper complaining about woke Ireland’s demonisation of a sweeter time. It really was this dire.
This rigorously researched film has much to say about the writing. Contrasting voices such as the reliably lyrical Doireann Ní Ghríofa and the characteristically wry Anne Enright turn up to offer their wisdom. But, as you might expect with a study of such a figure, Blue Road is more remarkable for its consideration of how an extraordinary life was lived.
O’Shea, the director of A Mother Brings her Son to be Shot, interviewed a frail though still sardonic O’Brien shortly before the writer’s death last year. O’Shea also ploughed through reams of diaries (some angrily annotated by the writer’s first husband, Ernest Gébler) and passed on excerpts for Jessie Buckley to read with Munster grit.
This is partly a tale of barely creditable misogyny. One can observe a gentler version of that in British TV interviews with a condescending Cliff Michelmore (“Miss O’Brien”) treatment that contrasts with, later, a considerably more enlightened Melvyn Bragg (“Edna”).
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The hard-core stuff in Ireland is, however, at a different level. Our imaginary letter writers would, if this were fiction, blow a gasket at the story of the subject’s family flying to the Isle of Man to prise an adult O’Brien from Gébler’s clutches. Lovely Gabriel Byrne is here to remind us that literary Dublin was then “a male preserve”.
[ Edna O’Brien: ‘She could be so queenly and dominating, but then totally wounded by criticism’ ]
She got revenge through the traditional means of (for a while, anyway) living well. Blue Road reminds us that there was, in London, not a literary personality to compare to her during the 1960s and 1970s. New York had the brash, bruising Norman Mailer. Putney relished the less abrasive style of a glamorous Irish original.
Winding shots of Elizabeth Taylor and Robert Mitchum in with images of O’Brien occupying balconies, the film could only better summon up the era’s colour supplements if it also included ads for Sanderson wallpaper.
There is, of course, much misery and regret here. Money problems ensued. Too many men were too unsupportive. But Blue Road is most memorable for its crisply edited evocation of unlikely triumph.
In cinemas from Friday
