"Banshee of Inisherina" - a melancholy masterpiece with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson

On December 13, the premiere of the tragicomedy "Banshee of Inisherina" took place. The new film by Martin McDonagh can safely claim the title of the best picture in his filmography.

Banshee of Inisherina is Martin McDonagh's fourth feature film. Surprisingly, only now he has made a picture set in Ireland - as in most of his plays. McDonagh is in charge of the script, directing. He also acted as a producer of the film.

McDonagh assembled a familiar team - cameraman Ben Davis has been working with him since the film "Seven Psychopaths", and composer Carter Burwell wrote music for all the director's films. Starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson, the duo from the movie "Low Down in Bruges" is finally reunited. Also in the film are Kerry Condon ("Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri"), Barry Keoghan ("The Killing of a Sacred Deer"), Gary Lydon ("Calvary")

The action of the picture takes place in the 1920s in an Irish village located on an island. Padraic discovers that his best friend Colm is avoiding him. Trying to understand what happened, he brings his comrade to emotions. Colm explains that he doesn't like Paldrake anymore and doesn't want to be friends with him. After Padraic attempts to mend the relationship several times, Colm promises that he will cut off his fingers for every conversation they have. Given that there is no one else to be friends with in a small island village, Padraik begins to feel sad, but does not stop trying to win his friend back.

The brightest characters

Martin McDonagh is a great master of describing and revealing a character in a minimum amount of time, without using flashbacks or voice-over for this. A few lines and a couple of actions immediately explain who the hero is. Therefore, by the tenth minute, the viewer knows the characters very well and begins to empathize with them. "Banshee of Inisherin" is another scattering of bright heroes.

Who Padraic is and what lifestyle he leads becomes clear in the first minute of the film. This is a simple village guy who is satisfied with his lifestyle. He sells milk, babysits a little donkey, drinks beer in a bar - for happiness, communication with a friend and sister is enough for him.

Colm is an old musician who is desperate. He sees no meaning in life and is waiting for death. Conversations with his best friend began to seem like a waste of time to him. Colm is not evil, but arrogant. For example, he boastfully declares that he wants to write music that will live forever - like the music of Mozart,

The secondary characters are great in the movie. Siobhan, Padraic's sister, is a lonely woman who lives by reading books. Everyone thinks she's weird because she's not married, and no one asks her to marry because they think she's weird. Padre, a local policeman, beats his son, and the main event for him is an invitation to execution - he glad, because he will be paid and even fed, but he does not understand who will have to be executed, because he is entangled in newspaper summaries.

Strange male friendship

Many films have been made about male friendship, but hardly anyone has approached this issue in the same way as McDonagh - a little childish and naive. If you can stop loving a person, is it possible to “unfriend” him? This is exactly what happens to Colm, who turns the end of a friendship into the end of a romantic relationship.

Even yesterday, he spent time with Padraik, but suddenly realized that he no longer liked him. Padraic doesn't know how to react to this. In the end, this is not how friendships usually end, and he is exactly what is “ordinary”, he does not know how to make decisions in a new environment.

classic humor

In the films of Martin McDonagh, in principle, there are no funny moments that are not associated with pain. The Banshee of Inisherin follows this rule, but after about the middle of the picture, the humor becomes less and less - the tragedy of unfortunate people comes to the fore, even if the situation remains absurd.

But by then the viewer already knows that bread vans often run over people, and the policeman does not likes to be disturbed after masturbating - all in the spirit of the cow that was swindled in the movie "Six Shot".

Perhaps longtime McDonagh fans can guess at what point it will be funny and where the situations are hidden that will later serve as a setup, but this does not make them any worse.

Ideal enclosed space

McDonagh managed to show the island village as a closed space, separated from the world. What's happening on the mainland can be heard, but it's insanely far away for the locals. They know that a civil war is going on, and they hear it, but at the same time they absolutely do not want to figure out who is fighting for what.

Much more residents are interested in news. More precisely, News - with a capital letter.
"Any news?" is not just a question, but a giant request. The villagers see the same thing every day, but they really want to listen to at least something interesting. Who deceived whom, where the fight happened, whether someone committed suicide - any information becomes valuable, it is passed on and discussed as the event of the century.

The meat seller, through whom the village receives letters, knows everything, because she opens all the envelopes. But she interrogates each visitor additionally.

“You never tell me anything,” she says to Siobhan with hatred.

This set of gossip, in which absolutely every inhabitant appears, turns out to be a self-sufficient world, much brighter and more colorful than the distant mainland.

He also leads Colm, who feels like a great musician, to longing - everything is familiar to him, and therefore boring. However, he himself believes that Mozart lived in the 17th century, so even the local intellectual is not very educated. There is a world beyond Inisherin, but it is not well understood.

expected death

The picture begins as an absurd comedy, but with every minute there are less and less jokes. Outwardly funny heroes live in despair, any deprivation makes you once again convinced that everything is meaningless, there is only death that will come one day.

The theme of death is almost central to all the work of Martin McDonagh, especially in his cinematic incarnation. The death of a child in "Six Shooter", an external threat from criminals in "Lying Under in Bruges" and "Seven psychopaths", an accidental murder in "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri" - everywhere the death of people determined action of heroes.

In Banshee of Inisherin, no one is going to kill the characters (although the war is going on at their side), but they themselves want to die. This is the most unhappy picture of McDonagh - in principle, there is no way out of the current situation, only feelings, despair, anxiety. It immediately turns out that the story of ordinary people thinking about death is always scarier than stories about killers. And "Banshee Inisherina" easily scares the viewer.

Despite the fact that Martin McDonagh used quite a lot of elements from his past films (up to the acting duet), the picture turned out to be original. The Banshee of Inisherina is arguably Martin McDonagh's best film. By the way, banshees are fairies from Irish folklore, the appearance of which indicates the approach of death. It can happen even if you get hit by a bread wagon, which is not uncommon.