New Movie! The Secret of Roan Inish

They say the Irish are storytellers, and this is the story of how a plucky little Irish girl reclaims her heritage after being treated to a series of them--stories, that is--told to her by various relatives on her visit back to rural Ireland. Apparently, Fiona Coneelly is island stock. Her aunt and uncle are renting a cottage with a view out its windows of the land that the Coneellys left, years back, but still own. Fiona's sent to stay with them, and she starts right in asking about the island.

The Secret of Roan Inish is a bit hard to get into, at first. The plot advances a bit slowly; the editing's a bit stiff; the Irish English, a bit, well, impenetrable. I discovered it before I had the luxury of turning on subtitles, and I taught myself its lines, by, well, you know, watching it over and over. Once I'd seen the film enough times that I could understand what the characters were saying, I could pretty much say it along with them, and so many of their lines stuck in my head, in the brogue in which they were delivered.

The Secret of Roan Inish is taken from a children's story. It's magic realism, I guess they'd say; the real-life tale is interspersed with fanciful chapters of the family's history, which appears to be all tied up with the local seals--I do not mean Navy, here!--thanks to the fact that, back generations ago, the Coneellys apparently mixed blood with a Selkie woman. Their mainland neighbors whisper about it, still, making the family wish it could just go back and live on Seal Island (that's what Roan Inish means). Fiona's the catalyst, but first she has to grok the present-day environment; she's spent the last few years living in Dublin with her alcoholic father who's a factory worker, there. They own some pretty cool real estate, for peasant folk. If I owned an island, I'd rattle the cage about it, too; I would!

This is my favorite encouragement film. Fiona's the 'little engine that could,' and in the end she makes things happen. Many of the quotes occur to me “in times of trouble,” and, though I take issue with more details in this story than in the others I’ve reported so far, I love it all the more for what I perceive to be its flaws. (Why does your uncle drop you off on the island the first time you ask him to, when no one else—neither adult nor child—is allowed to go there? Why is your uncle so willing to launch into a maudlin tale about the day the family evacuated the island, right after he declares his reluctance to speak of those events? Why are the little boy’s footprints bigger than his sister’s hand? And so on.)

I’ll attempt the usual five (more) posts about Roan Inish:

1. Arrival, Setting the Scene
2. Fiona’s Heritage

3. A Plan is Hatched  

4. Life Goes On
5. Forced Into Action

It’s a sweet film, I think you’ll like it as much as I do!