I love the movie theater experience and I do regret not seeing The Quiet Girl in such a setting. Watching it at home was meaningful, but as I’ve said over and over in these posts, size matters: the bigger screen the larger the emotions. But The Quiet Girl is still worth seeing, no matter your screen’s dimensions.
Nominated for both the Oscar and Bafta Awards for Best International Film, Colm Bairead adapted and then directed a Claire Keegan novella titled “Foster”.
The movie is a quiet pond of a film, yet packs a punch in sentimentality. The basic premise is a child being raised in an overpopulated and under-loved house, who subsequently becomes the scapegoat of all of the family’s cloistered frustrations. Fortunately, a relative couple is willing to take in the little girl for the summer, while her mother prepares for the birth of what looks like perhaps the sixth child.
The child is brilliantly portrayed by Catherine Clinch while her foster parents (actress Carrie Crowley and Andrew Bennett) equally fill the screen with profound stillness. As Andrew’s character so aptly states, “Many’s the person missed the opportunity to say nothing, and lost much because of it.”.
The quote comes at a pivotal moment in the screenplay/film when the quiet girl’s foster father gives her permission to be silent. Accepting someone and acknowledging his/her’s uniqueness/eccentricities is probably the greatest form of love of all.
I’m grateful that my film buddy, Gus Mollasis coerced me to seek this one out. The film aided in a lovely flashback connection to a poem I use to teach by Robert Frost called “The Pasture” which almost spot on depicts the foster father’s (who owns a dairy farm) eventual ability to connect to the child:
The Pasture by Robert Frost
I’m going out to clean the pasture spring;
I’ll only stop to rake the leaves away
(And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
I’m going out to fetch the little calf
That’s standing by the mother. It’s so young,
It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
I sha’n’t be gone long.—You come too.
