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The Rocky Road to Dublin film review
THE ROCKY ROAD TO DUBLIN
Running time: 96 mins
Starring: John Huston, Conor Cruise O'Brien
Banned in its native Ireland, where it has never even been shown on TV, Peter Lennon's 1968 documentary paints a fascinating and unexpected picture of Irish society. Instead of being full of the craic and blarney, Lennon's controversial work portrays a people living in a state of repression and fear, unable to really embrace the liberation from the English some 50 years earlier. In short, asks Lennon, 'What do you do with your revolution once you've got it'?
Now receiving a welcome re-release after achieving critical success on the festival circuit, the film shows Lennon attempting to answer his own question, and no quarter is taken in his attempt to find the truth. Politicians were unable or unwilling to embrace modernization, and instead forced the country to live in a subdued state where sex was almost a forbidden topic, the censor wielded inordinate power and a failed attempt to promote Gaelic as the national language lingered for years. Indeed, the country emerges as something of an Orwellian nightmare, quaintly referring to World War II as 'the emergency'. Even the GAA, responsible for the country's national sports of hurling and Gaelic football, refused to sanction any other 'foreign games'.
Most scathing - and accurate - of all is Lennon's attack on the church, which controlled schooling and, to a certain extent, the politicians themselves. The clergy is personified by the presence of one Father Michael Cleary, whose jovial singing priest routine is one of the highlights of the film and a surreal forerunner of Father Ted. Bewildered schoolchildren are shown reciting Catholic doctrine, and any discussion of an alternative was simply not tolerated.
This is ethnographic film-making at its best and ranks alongside Bunuel's Los Olvidados as a classic study of society. Lennon fortuitously enlisted the great French cinematographer Raoul Coutard, whose work helped define the Nouvelle Vague, and his photography is both engrossing and a lesson to any would-be documentary-makers in how to let the camera do the talking.
This should be essential viewing for any native Irish man or woman, and indeed the wider Irish diaspora. It would also be interesting to see an updated film by Lennon, to see how manners and mores have changed in the period of the so-called Celtic Tiger. Indeed, an accompanying 'making of' goes some way to address this, highlighting some interesting aspects of how the film was made and the reaction to it, as well as throwing some surprising new light on the characters involved, notably the singing priest himself. As Ireland slowly embraces the truth of its own history - helped in part by film such as this and Peter Mullan's 'The Magdalene Sisters' - The Rocky Road to Dublin is an invaluable and rare document.
Paul Hurley
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