Reviews

Film

Garage

Directed by Leonard Abrahamson, starring Pat Shortt, Anne-Marie Duff, Conor Ryan, George Costigan

Irish director Lenny Abrahamson has given us a very impressive follow-up to his 2004 debut feature, Adam & Paul. Garage is beautifully shot and just as beautifully acted; the ravishing, if austere, landscape of the west of Ireland serves as a counterweight to the movie's gritty-realist idiom. This is a gentle and elegaic lament for lives wasted and lives on the brink of waste. Everything in the movie - cinematography, acting and directing - combines to produce a sweet, sad music.

There is a strong performance from Pat Shortt, and a tremendous supporting contribution from Anne-Marie Duff. It is such a lovely-looking film, and intelligently concerned with a visual and cinematic aesthetic, it seems churlish to offer a complaint, but mine would be that as the storyline develops towards its close, it gets locked too strictly into tragic inevitability. It will make one wonder if Abrahamson might not have imagined something more unexpected for his principal character.

Pat Shortt plays Josie, a heavy-set fellow in middle age who in time past would be described as simple-minded; the phrase now might be borderline learning difficulties, although this disability is of the mildest sort. Like a great, lovable kid, he ambles about with a big moon-faced smile under a baseball cap, holding his arms stiffly in front of him like a child in a school play. He works at a shabby old petrol station in the middle of nowhere and one summer the boss chivvies Josie into staying open longer at the weekend, and Josie, simple soul that he is, cheerfully agrees without thinking to ask for more pay. These later-opening summer nights, with their glorious skies, are to be the backdrop first for comedy. Shortt has some funny business with the ridiculously pointless odd jobs he sets himself to do, and his obsessive concern with where to put the "oils". Then it's tragedy. Josie is given a teenage assistant, David (Conor Ryan), with whom he develops an unlikely friendship, the first of his adult life. There's also his joshing acquaintance with sleazy trucker Dan, played by George Costigan (the "Bob" in Alan Clarke's Rita, Sue and Bob Too). The outcome suggests that Josie's private thoughts have always been deeper and darker than they appear on his sunny surface. The irony is that the friendship with David, which brings Josie out of himself, causes him dimly to question his lot and to strive, however pathetically, for more. He has always nursed a crush on Carmel (Anne-Marie Duff); she works at the local shop and feels pity and affection for Josie, and is lonely enough herself. It is a brilliant moment when Carmel finds herself close-dancing with Josie one evening at the pub and then suddenly breaks away, aware not merely that she had come horribly close to the humiliation of having got sexually intimate with the town idiot in public, but that in some deeper, more insidious sense, Josie was drawing her down with him into an abyss of failure and loneliness.

Garage is superbly paced and controlled, and Abrahamson creates something visually stunning with landscapes that, like the English fenland, are beautiful yet daunting. One might wondered if there might not have been other fates he could have dreamt up for Josie: but this is a gem of a film nonetheless, and Shortt's performance is outstanding. The Guardian

Book

David Golder, The Ball, Snow in Autumn

By Irene Nemirovsky (Everyman's Library/Alfred A. Knopf)

Most American readers discovered Irene Nemirovsky only in 2006, when a translation of Suite Francaise, a one-volume edition of a pair of novellas about the early days of the German occupation, was finally published, more than 60 years after they were written, during the period before her arrest. Nemirovsky died at Auschwitz in 1942. Now, with the reissue of four short works of her early fiction, present-day readers have the chance to gain a fuller sense of this writer's considerable power and youthful weaknesses.

New York Times Syndicate

(China Daily 03/11/2008 page20)