DIR: Aisling Walsh • WRI: Aisling Walsh and Kevin Byron-Murphy • PROD: Tristan Orpen Lynch, Dominic Wright, John McDonnell, Kevin Byron-Murphy • DOP: Peter Robertson • ED: Bryan Oates • CAST: Aidan Quinn, Iain Glen, Marc Warren, John Travers
Time was, and gloomy time it was too, when the only films you could expect from this country were issue movies. Irish film theorists urged us to believe this was a consequence of genetics. Want to make a comedy? Give me a blood sample! Maybe they were right, though: after a slew of 'comedies' (most but not all responsible for those inverted commas) it's almost a pleasure to be presented with a good old-fashioned Irish Issue Film on clerical abuse. Song For a Raggy Boy follows hard on The Magdalene Sisters, which was a British film on an Irish issue. Economically that did well in Ireland and Italy, and is currently doing very well from a staggered release in the clerical abuse-jarred United States. All of which may or may not augur well commercially for Song For a Raggy Boy. Does anybody want to see another clerical abuse story?
Certainly, if we look at this purely politically, anybody in Ireland should want to see this film. It is timely, coinciding neatly with the stalling of efforts to compensate victims of religious orders. Despite the labour-saving dramatic devices that might undermine claims of realism (whatever that is), Song For a Raggy Boy leaves us in no doubt of what is meant by the term abuse. This isn't the odd slap in the face or a little inappropriate touching. This is severe beating, torture, anal rape and murder of children. The mere fact that we are dealing with children makes this arguably the most violent Irish film ever made. If the precise series of events portrayed did not take place, events similar to them certainly did. And it's no harm right now to be reminded of the fact.
Song For a Raggy Boy reminds me of a time when you could slip an issue B-Movie into a double feature and come away with an American Classic like Riot On Cell Block 11 or Shock Corridor. Lesser films of the same ilk were clunky and programmatic, like this one. The story goes: Aidan Quinn plays the Glenn Ford part as William Franklin, a nice guy back from fighting the Spanish Civil War where he lost his young Spanish bride to the fascists. He takes up a post at an 'industrial school'/child death camp run by the 'Catholic Brothers' (get it?). You can see the components of the drama fall into place at this point, with a clunk like a lump hammer hitting the floorboards. We have the insane sadist-fascist nemesis, Brother John (Iain Glen), with his creepy sex-abuser sidekick, Brother Mac (Mark Warren). They measure up against Franklin, who stands for modernity and tolerance, bravery, despite the weakness in himself (grief, incipient alcoholism, fatalism) which he must overcome. As sure as Franklin helps the boys build toys, Brother John will break them, and the fingers that hold them. The vaguely sympathetic and progressive onlookers of the brotherhood stand back and raise their hands, frown at Franklin for being so forthright in his condemnation of cruelty and injustice. Inevitably in this scheme of things, Brother John graduates from torture to the murder of Franklin's favourite pupil Liam (played by John Travers), who after stony beginnings has inevitably flourished in his teacher's care. Brother John is suspended, and inevitably has his head kicked in by Franklin in the hold-me-back-before-I-kill-him scene. The where-are-they-now? title cards that end the film leave us in no doubt: the church condones, the perpetrators go unpunished.
Visually the film is coarse, underlining its 16 mm origins. It looks like it was shot quickly, using pretty simple set-ups. It employs one location relentlessly. Because it borrows from (among other things) the prison drama, its palette is grey, brown, blue and black. But for all its clunkiness it works. You could say almost because of its clunkiness: at a time when everything is getting smoothed down or prettied up in post, this still reeks of filmmaking. Aidan Quinn is the best Glenn Ford since Glenn Ford and the young cast are great. Song For a Raggy Boy is simple, economic and generic filmmaking that completely achieves its ambitions to create an engrossing human drama.
In cinemas 9th April 2004.
