Cal

This Irish "troubles" drama was the directorial debut of Pat O'Connor, who would go on to helm A Month in the Country, Circle of Friends, Inventing the Abbotts, and The January Man. It was produced by the legendary British-Irish classy impresario David Puttnam (Chariots of Fire, Local Hero, Midnight Express, The Mission, The Killing Fields). Based on the popular novella by Bernard MacLaverty, who also wrote the script, Cal tells the story of a young Catholic living in rural Northern Ireland in the 1970s who gets involved with the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Like so many movies of the era from this part of the world, it deals with the troubles through a fictional cinematic narrative, which, along with novels, was the principal way for Irish artists to process their feelings about the situation in Northern Ireland.

John Lynch stars as the titular working-class lad who lives with his widower father (Donal McCann) and becomes obsessed with a widowed woman, Marcella (Helen Mirren). Marcella is a Catholic whose husband, a Protestant policeman, was killed a year earlier by the IRA. When Cal comes to work for and live with Marcella's family, he and Marcella forge a bond based less on mutual attraction and more on their shared grief. But their romance is up against a hefty number of obstacles, and Cal is forced to conceal a terrible secret from Marcella while avoiding the police and the local boys who frequently beat him up.

This is a bleak film. Even without the beatings, shootings, bombings, and house burnings, the depiction of life in this part of the world is incredibly depressing—spending the day working out in the cold, damp fields or the bloody abattoir, having to go back and forth through armed checkpoints, getting hassled or to worse based on nothing but your religion, and having little to come home to but weak tea and an uncomfortable bathtub. No one in this film even plays a musical instrument. Still, the actors are beautiful and create rich portraits of these depressing lives. Mirren won the Best Actress prize at Cannes for her performance, which was one of the many romantic, passionate roles she was known for long before she became the sexy grandame of British cinema. Mark Knopfler composed his second evocative movie soundtrack, which has many similarities to his music for Local Hero the prior year, but instead of instilling a wistful mood offset by a triumphant saxophone, the tin-whistle-centered score for Cal strikes a distinctly plaintive tone.