1996, the best year in movie history, pt. 67: The secret of Roan Inish
This gentle movie is the closest I’ve seen to a live-action My Neighbor Totoro or Ponyo. Set and filmed in Ireland with Irish actors, it’s not just Irish. It’s based on a book set in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland; the book’s Canadian-born author, Rosalie K. Fry, lived in Wales. The movie’s director, John Sayles, is from the United States. His movies explore social issues. This one is more primal. Its protagonists are citizens of the sea.
They dwell on a sparsely-peopled coast. They aren’t outcasts or recluses or separatists; they’re pulled spiritually – or naturally (the distinction is blurred) – toward the water. Their numbers have dwindled, and they’ve moved to the mainland, deserting their native Roan Inish (“seal island”). They pine for their old home. They occasionally paddle their fishing boats over to Roan Inish, where the abandoned huts still stand, disheveled but sturdy.
Seals have long frequented this island and communed with the people. Legends say that some of the islanders were born of Selkies (seal-women). Selkie traits have been passed down. Some of the people are fair, some, dark; the dark ones are especially seal-like.
A golden-haired little girl, Fiona, whose family has moved away from the community, returns to live with her grandparents. (Her mother has died and her father is drowning his sorrows in the taverns.) The movie is especially Totoro-like when it observes the child exploring beaches and meadows, gathering mussels, and stirring liquid boat-tar for her grandfather. She listens to the locals’ wondrous tales: Seals save a youth from drowning. A man captures a Selkie and makes her his wife. A baby – Jamie, Fiona’s brother – is pulled out to the sea, by the tide, in a wooden ark-cradle; from time to time, the islanders glimpse a cherubic little boy bobbing on the waves in his cradle or running along the beaches.
These stories are told as if they might be true. Fiona accepts them as true.
The tellings are haunting, as achingly beautiful as any scenes in any movie. The movie is visually beautiful: It was filmed by the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler. The land and sky and sea are beautiful. So is Fiona, the serene little girl.
There is a tradition of literary criticism that says that stories fall into patterns of universal archetypes, and that these patterns can be arranged by season: romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), satire and irony (winter), and comedy (spring). (Never mind that not every culture recognizes the same seasons.) One season leads to the next. Children begin with romance. Romance fixes its gaze on a world apart from ours, idealized and inaccessible (at least right now). Edenic literature is romantic literature.
People outgrow Eden; or, rather, their injuries and sins bar them from it. They move on to sadness, then to cynicism. If they’re fortunate, they’ll achieve comic rebirth. To this end, it may help them to retain some picture of Eden, to acknowledge rather than disavow the imaginative role that romance plays in the cycle.
This is the kind of picture that The Secret of Roan Inish gives us: a picture of innocence, of the most absorbing and hopeful moments of childhood, of natural beauty, of a lost home worth seeking. A romance for adults.
They dwell on a sparsely-peopled coast. They aren’t outcasts or recluses or separatists; they’re pulled spiritually – or naturally (the distinction is blurred) – toward the water. Their numbers have dwindled, and they’ve moved to the mainland, deserting their native Roan Inish (“seal island”). They pine for their old home. They occasionally paddle their fishing boats over to Roan Inish, where the abandoned huts still stand, disheveled but sturdy.
Seals have long frequented this island and communed with the people. Legends say that some of the islanders were born of Selkies (seal-women). Selkie traits have been passed down. Some of the people are fair, some, dark; the dark ones are especially seal-like.
A golden-haired little girl, Fiona, whose family has moved away from the community, returns to live with her grandparents. (Her mother has died and her father is drowning his sorrows in the taverns.) The movie is especially Totoro-like when it observes the child exploring beaches and meadows, gathering mussels, and stirring liquid boat-tar for her grandfather. She listens to the locals’ wondrous tales: Seals save a youth from drowning. A man captures a Selkie and makes her his wife. A baby – Jamie, Fiona’s brother – is pulled out to the sea, by the tide, in a wooden ark-cradle; from time to time, the islanders glimpse a cherubic little boy bobbing on the waves in his cradle or running along the beaches.
These stories are told as if they might be true. Fiona accepts them as true.
The tellings are haunting, as achingly beautiful as any scenes in any movie. The movie is visually beautiful: It was filmed by the great cinematographer Haskell Wexler. The land and sky and sea are beautiful. So is Fiona, the serene little girl.
There is a tradition of literary criticism that says that stories fall into patterns of universal archetypes, and that these patterns can be arranged by season: romance (summer), tragedy (autumn), satire and irony (winter), and comedy (spring). (Never mind that not every culture recognizes the same seasons.) One season leads to the next. Children begin with romance. Romance fixes its gaze on a world apart from ours, idealized and inaccessible (at least right now). Edenic literature is romantic literature.
People outgrow Eden; or, rather, their injuries and sins bar them from it. They move on to sadness, then to cynicism. If they’re fortunate, they’ll achieve comic rebirth. To this end, it may help them to retain some picture of Eden, to acknowledge rather than disavow the imaginative role that romance plays in the cycle.
This is the kind of picture that The Secret of Roan Inish gives us: a picture of innocence, of the most absorbing and hopeful moments of childhood, of natural beauty, of a lost home worth seeking. A romance for adults.