Cinema Quarantino is an ongoing series of alternative streaming picks for the self-quarantined and the socially distanced, as selected by the film staff of Boston Hassle. To browse the rest of our picks, click here.
THE FILM: Maeve (1981) dir. Pat Murphy
THE STREAMER: MUBI
There’s a scene in Pat Murphy’s Maeve in which a young woman is stopped by British soldiers — a common experience when walking home late at night in 1980s Belfast. As they question her, one of the soldiers comments on her name: “What’s ‘Roisin’ Irish for anyway?” he asks. “It’s not Irish for anything,” she replies, “it’s just Irish.”
In a way, Murphy is having the same conversation with her audience. Maeve asserts a feminine experience of the Troubles through emotional and political truths that exist beyond translation or projection. She seeks to convey her own understanding of an elemental Irishness, a mode of being that need not be explained or justified, but simply is.
The film focuses on Maeve Sweeney (Mary Jackson), an Irish art student living in London, who returns home to her Catholic neighborhood in Belfast to visit her parents and sister (Brid Brennan as the aforementioned Roisin). The story proceeds in an episodic manner, with scenes from Maeve’s youth and childhood playing out alongside the present-day action. The seeming simplicity of the premise belies the film’s daring originality. Murphy and her crew shot entirely on location, something that, given the tumult of making a movie in a war zone, very few productions about the Troubles can claim. The only film crews in Belfast during the early ’80s were documenting the conflict for television news; Maeve offers an alternative to this ubiquitous reportage.
The movie shows an awareness of outsiders’ conceptions of Northern Ireland. On her flight home, Maeve meets an Englishman embarking on a tour of megalithic sites — he does not, however, intend to step foot anywhere near Belfast. He prefers a quainter version of Ireland, filled with ancient magic and “lost knowledge.” Maeve is also ambivalent about how those in the Republic understand occupied Ulster, and feels that she and her community are merely “fictions of their nationalism.” The film pushes aside these attitudes, and lets Maeve fill up the space with her tangled, fraught relationships to home, history, and gender.
In Maeve’s Belfast, the Troubles infiltrate every aspect of ordinary life. From the playground at school, to a night out, to a morning walk on the causeway, the conflict dictates rules of engagement. Equally omnipresent are women’s subjugation and the threat of sexual violence. Sexual assault and harassment are crucial for the British army’s colonial domination, and they menace Maeve and Roisin repeatedly throughout the story. The film is deeply interested in the interplay between nationalism and patriarchy. Maeve cannot fully accept the revolutionary ideals of her ex-boyfriend, Liam (John Keegan), because of the erasure of women that she sees in their foundation. She urgently pursues a feminism that can resolve these tensions, but finds herself searching around in the dark. The women around her are brave and rebellious, and protect and care for each other, yet Maeve still stands apart. Her critical perspective on the republican movement is not one that everybody can afford, and her views on abortion, androgyny, and gender roles are different from those of Catholic Ireland.
Maeve is a film that has aged exceptionally well, in part because of its interrogation of historical narratives. Maeve is skeptical of history, and the way it’s manipulated for the purpose of indoctrination, and this attitude is embedded in the film’s formal devices. Scenes from Maeve’s childhood and teen years aren’t presented as memories; there is no neat mechanism that guides how the story cuts between timelines. Rather, past and present exist all at once. Murphy’s refusal to conform to a linear structure breaks down our notion of progress, on both personal and political levels. Maeve’s emotional and intellectual yearnings are the same ones she’s always carried; meanwhile, the Troubles continue in a destructive, interminable stalemate. When Maeve and Liam argue about how to interpret the past, the film demonstrates its own consciousness of being a historical artifact. It provokes the audience to examine how we receive the movie, and ensures that every time we watch, we’re seeing something new.
Maeve
1981
dir. Pat Murphy, co-dir. John Davies
110 min.
Currently streaming on MUBI
