New in cinema: Irishman Martin McDonagh tells the story of the abrupt end of a male friendship in his sophisticated drama “The Banshees of Inisherin”.
By Martin Schwickert
01/03/2023 – 11:20
In 1923, Pádraic Súilleabháin’s (Colin Farrell) life is concise. In the morning, the farmer from the (fictional) island of Inisherin off the west coast of Ireland drives his cattle to pasture and cleans the barn. Every afternoon at 2pm he meets his friend Colm Doherty (Brendan Gleeson) in the only pub for a pint of Guinness. It always has been and always will be, like everything else, thought Pádraic. He’s not a man who likes to think outside the box, and he’s perfectly content with what he has. But one afternoon, when he wants to pick up his friend to go to the pub, Colm doesn’t open the door.
Pádraic peers through the smeared window. Colm sits motionless in his chair, staring at the wall and ignoring any effort the visitor is making to draw attention to himself. She later shows up at the pub and tells Pádraic that she wants nothing more to do with him. “I can’t stand you anymore,” Colm explains, making the final line sound like falling scaffolding.
The question of meaning changes everything
He suddenly ends the friendship because he has asked himself a question that would never have occurred to Pádraic: What is the meaning of my life? Colm longs to finally give such meaning to his monotonous existence on the island. The violinist wants to compose his own piece and create something that lasts beyond his earthly existence. In this new creative life, boring conversations with the easy-to-join friend no longer have a place. What was once a natural part of everyday life is now a complete waste of time for Colm.
Obviously Pádraic is offended. He can’t believe he got dumped like that and desperately tries to get his ex boyfriend’s attention back. When it becomes too much for him, Colm backs up his demands to be left alone with a gruesome threat: he vows to cut off his finger with scissors whenever Pádraic speaks to him.
Conflict poisons the soul
Following his 2018 Academy Award-winning film Three Billboards outside Ebbing, Missouri, Martin McDonagh returns to his native Ireland with his new film The Banshees of Inisherin. There he tells the comical, tragic and drastic story of a male friendship that was cut short in the cosmos of the fictional island. With a small and well-matched personal tableau, McDonagh develops a sophisticated and finely tempered chamber opera without romanticizing Irish clichés.
The vastness of the landscape – much of which was filmed on the Aaron Islands in The Book of Galway – is a productive contrast to the emotional and social narrow-mindedness of island life, which both Colm and Pádraic’s sister Siobhan (Kerry Condon ), they fight. With analytical patience and dark humor, McDonagh explores both sides of the male conflict, which escalates into the bizarre and increasingly begins to poison Pádraic’s harmless soul structure. The unacknowledged fear of loneliness, the desire for self-actualization, strict adherence to principles and a very masculine inability not to get out of one’s position in conflicts lead to a toxic escalation of events.
A parable on the mechanics of war
It is fitting that the story is set at the time of the Irish Civil War. Shots and detonations occasionally ring out from the mainland, the islanders shrug. For even in this war, the seeds of which germinated again in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, good friends and neighbors became implacable enemies who fought bloody battles. McDonagh examines how this is possible in the smallest interactive space of a male friendship: the destructive dynamics unfold here under the microscope.
In between, existential problems are repeatedly discussed in wonderful dialectical simplicity: Who has a better chance of being remembered after death, a good composer or a nice human being?
An upcoming awards season favorite
Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell, who appeared together in McDonagh’s “Bruges See… – And Die,” interact with their deeply fallible characters with verve and tenderness. But it’s Kerry Condon (“Better Call Saul”), as the godfather sister, who emerges as a crystalline female voice from the dysfunctional male chorus. “The Banshees of Inisherin” was awarded Best Screenplay at Venice, is a clear favorite at the Golden Globes with eight nominations and should not go empty-handed in the Oscar nominations on January 24th either.
Inisherin’s Banshees: IRL 2022. Directed by Martin McDonagh. With Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson. 109 minutes. From 16
