Brooklyn
This has got to be the only film about Ireland without the sound of bagpipes on the soundtrack. How did they do it?
I know, this is not really a film about Ireland. It’s really about the big city / small town dichotomy, love triangles with “social pressure”, and no religion whatsoever even though it’s present in every scene.
A smart but impoverished girl, raised in a small Irish town catches her big break with a Church affiliated boarding house in New York and a proper visa. No bribing the Elis Island pre-ICE cops, no stowaway, just one of the rare cases of legal immigration. At first she is a shrinking violet and homesick, until she meets an Italian guy, which is not really Catholic, just a baseball believer. She achieves cultural integration very soon, and with hard work she’s on a bright path to 2.3 children and a white picket fence.
Out of the fecking blue, her sister dies mysteriously (not even a suicide!), and our hero goes back “home” for a while, to remind herself of what was she pining for. Before going back, she marries the Italian, just for dramatic purposes.
In a series of baffling decisions, she hides the marriage from everyone (including her mum), and doesn’t reject the advances of a second-billed Domhnall Gleason. At times, you could argue she is recklessly hurting both sides of the love triangle.
The small town style catches up with her when the semi-public affair comes to the forefront, but since her mother doesn’t break down, I word what all the fuss was about?
After wanking the chain of a local richie trust fund kid, she dumps him by letter and bails.
7/10, would immigrate again.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.