26/04/2024 - Pat Collins’ gentle drama surveys a village community in the Irish countryside whose way of life is gradually disappearing

Barely good craic, yet also not doleful miserabilism, That They May Face the Rising Sun is an even-keeled folk song of a vanishing rural Ireland, adapted from acclaimed writer John McGahern’s final novel by director Pat Collins. Set around the turn of the 1980s, it depicts the agrarian labour and true community spirit of the country’s western outskirts as something to fondly recall and re-dramatise, as Irish period and historical films are prone to doing, also seen recently in the Oscar-nominated The Quiet Girl [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Colm Bairéad
film profile]. Following a BFI London world premiere last autumn, the film gradually picked up steam at other European festivals, culminating in a Best Film Award victory at the recent IFTAs (see the news), and it arrives in domestic and UK cinemas this week, courtesy of Conic.

At the movie’s centre is the celebrated, fictional author Joe Ruttledge (Barry Ward, from Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall [+see also:
film review
trailer
Q&A: Ken Loach
film profile]), who feels like a prized inhabitant of his village community, a local boy who “done good”, who was feted in London and who now lives a comfortable life in his old family environs, all the better to pen a beautifully observed little novel inspired by what he sees (Collins shows us intermittent scenes of him writing longhand at his desk as dusk falls). His marital bond with his wife Kate (German actress Anna Bederke), an artist and London gallery owner, is loving and secure, without avoiding scrutiny of behaviours and tough professional sacrifices from either side.

Still, That They May Face the Rising Sun is primarily a piece of “kitchen table” cinema, a chamber drama confined largely to one sole location, but devoid of any fierce intensity or even much tension. The door is always open at the Ruttledges’ place, so neighbours and well-wishers cheerfully come on in. Joe’s uncle, “the Shah” (John Olohan), gently admonishes them for skipping Mass, and local labourers Jamesie (Phillip Dolan) and the charismatic Patrick (Labor Roddy) lament their own tough times and declining fortunes, whilst being grateful for the way their friends’ company nurses and neutralises any pain. Everyone seems to be middle-aged and above, underlined by a wedding midway through the story being of a couple consecrating their late-in-life romance.

Otherwise, the film’s message and themes are so gentle and understated that they can appear wispy, not helped by Joe’s arc gradually taking him from the apparent focal point to a detached audience-surrogate figure. Clad in a neat, tight-fitting sweater vest, whilst the rest of the ensemble cast have clumpier, rattier-looking knitwear, he unwittingly appears a good-looking, hollow cipher that the colourful supporting players can vent to. He’s unwaveringly present, and a willing volunteer in the third act’s wake scene, which requires him to dress the body according to proper tradition, yet we can’t be clear how he’s absorbing the events and synthesising them into the richer thesis that shapes any great piece of writing.

Moving into his first wholly fictional feature after a long career of documentary and hybrid work, Collins undeniably captures an authentic melancholy, his direction helping us sense the chill of the temperature, counteracted by the livestock fields wreathed in golden sunshine, but the full depth of McGahern’s originating novel and vision seems only fitfully transposed.

That They May Face the Rising Sun is a co-production by Ireland and the UK, staged by South Wind Blows Ltd, Cyprus Avenue Films and Harvest Films.