|
The excremental element is from Joyce, naturally, with a rose on top of it in the opening shot. (A low angle gives Dublin's cloudy sky glimpsed between brown-brick buildings, the camera tilts further down so that a fresh pile of manure can fill the screen.) The easygoing bachelor (Gene Wilder) lives with his querulous kin, improvises a comb out of a toothbrush, wears a tuxedo astride a bicycle, proudly bears a duckling's nickname. His wheelbarrow of dung keeps him away from the foundry, "as long as there's one horse left, I'll work me own business." The capricious coed from Connecticut (Margot Kidder) makes his acquaintance by nearly running him over, romance proceeds in fits and starts, strolls before St. Patrick's Cathedral and arguments on the Trinity campus. Full of tidbits, that "bloody American," including the Queen's love for Dublin Castle. "Well... it's easy enough to love something when it doesn't belong to you." Waris Hussein avails himself of Fellini's I Vitelloni for the protagonist's family, and there's Huston's The Misfits for the creeping modernity that will grind horses into dog food. Fertilizer sprinkled on window boxes, tea before casual afternoon delight with the wry housewife (Eileen Colgan), brush with the friendly neighborhood foot fetishist (David Kelly). Consummation and end of the affair, one is a nude half-silhouette at the fancy hotel and the other is a fish-eye lens at the rowdy pub. "Come on, you'll get used to it." "Fuck off." Nothing much, just a fleeting captivation with the extra documentary value of location filming. The deus ex machina is a relative in the New World, old as The Last Laugh. With May Ollis, Seamus Forde, Liz Davis, Danny Cummins, and Tony Doyle.
--- Fernando F. Croce |