The gray suburban fringes of the region on the north side of Cork are gradually colored with hope in “Christy”, a comforting old -fashioned with few narrative surprises but a feeling of belonging, people and winning and authentic vernacular. Following a gloomy teenage victim of the Irish social protection system when he found his half-before damaged equally, slowly finding a feeling of goal and belonging to the world, the first feature by Brendan Canty is satisfactorily extended by his short 2019 short film of the same title. In the process, it has become not only a contained domestic drama, but a inhabited study of the workers’ community in a neglected section of the second Irish city.
A success with the public in Berlinale – where he opened the 14Plus generation program focused on the young people of the festival, and won the first prize for the section jury – the Canty film has since benefited from a popular racing at the International Festival, proving its cultural particularities without obstacle to its universal crossroads. After opening the Fest Transilvania last month before appearing in the Horizons program of Karlovy Vary, he will play Galway and Edinburgh before his Irish and British release at the end of the summer. In the end, sunny and often bubbling – up to a hip -hop number common to its fence – it is an honest overview which nevertheless works hard for its emotional uprising, comparable in theme and call to the recent candidate for Irish Oscars “The Quiet Girl”, although with the execution of Scappier.
When we meet Christy, 17 (Danny Power, repeating her role of short film) at the start of the film, it is difficult to imagine that his perma-scowl moving so early. Since the death of his mother earlier, he has been bounced from a home home to another, never settling in any of them, and becoming kept and combative in the process. Having been ejected from his last house after having fought with another boy, he is now in the limbo: almost too old for social care but not yet able to take care of himself, he sought refuge with his older half-brother Shane (Diarmaid Noyes), who shares a humble house of advice with his partner Stacey (Emma Willis) and their child.
The arrangement, strongly insists Shane, is strictly temporary: there is little lost love between two brothers and sisters who, having grown up years of interval under separate roofs, barely know each other. An independent painter -decorator who prides himself on sticking to the right and narrow, Shane houses his own trauma for years in the healthcare system – which the brothers have in common, however, threatens to separate them more than he brings them together. You need the frustrated stacey, played with warmth and good humor by Willis in what could be a part of stock, to delicately arbitrate the thorny silences of men, and initiate a way of filling the conversation between them.
Until this happens, however, Christy finds kinship elsewhere – mainly in a herd with a raw but sweet weapon of local children conducted unofficially by a robot user of a wheelchair (Jamie Forde), who draws the newcomer from his shell by a charisma force. Meanwhile, Pauline (Helen Behan), a friend close to her late mother, intervenes to offer part of the substitution maternity that she misses all this time, finally offering her work modestly paid in her hair salon at home. Christy, he emerges, has a real self -taught talent for the hairstyle: a viable path to a stable life, if he can simply resist the appeal of his surrounded gangsters.
It is the fabric of the old melodrama like the Hills, because a vulnerable young person is taken between good and much worse life paths. (Nobody is really bad in “Christy”, a film sensitive to social and economic circumstances that cannot be left out of the off course – although a bit of wandering intrigue is centered on a drug addict played by the star of “Saltburn” Alison Oliver feels more artificial than the rest.) Is a particularly promising artist.
Above all, the film bypasses the moralist cliché, just as it also avoids the brutal realism of laundry cuisine to land somewhere in the middle: sentimental but properly lived, optimistic human but not blindly naive with regard to the realities of inadequate poverty and well-being in modern Ireland. Canty, previously a director of Videoclips who won a MTV VMA nomination for the clip “Take Me to Church” by Hozier, is a visual stylist not attacked but subtly assured, while flashes of organic beauty in the middle of Tarmac and Pebble-Dash textures, while DP Cole Hogan was most interested in the years. When Christy even cracks a tight smile, he’s close to a moment Alloujah.
