"In the Sun It All Looks So Nice": A Note on Paul Almond's Isabel

I it hard to write about Isabel (1968). That is in .part because (as is of course not the case with; .say, Hitchcock's or Bergman's work) I can't depend on its being known well, or at all, outside Canada: it isn't even listed by Maltin or Halliwell; it is a third of a century old; and it has dialogue that, for anyone who is not attuned to Canadian speech, is extremely elusive in places. It is difficult to write about partly, also; because it is such an intensely and elliptically cinematic work that its various components-plot, setting,. cinematography, direction, cutting, use of sound both diegetic and extrdiegetic and, last but by no means least, the absolutely extraordinary acting of Genevieve Bujold in the title-role--intertwine so inseparably that any written discussion is bound to seem insufferably clumsy, and a prose exposition is likely to leave the reader in as baffled a state as Isabel herself. But find a copy and see it! is hardly helpful criticism. The story could not be simpler, at least on the surface. It is told in some 35 sequences averaging under 3 minutes! each. Isabel has been summoned home to her mother's funeral. In the couple of weeks that she spends in the village where she grew up, she comes to learn, mostly inadvertently, a good many horrifying truths about a family background that, back in 1968, must have seemed bizarre to the point of incredibility. We first meet Isabel on the train, called home from Montreal, where she works, to her mother's funeral in the small fishing-village (apparently on the Peninsule de Gaspe in Quebec) where she grew up. I don't think it is hindsight on my part to say that, at once, before we know anything about the family or the village, we have a strong sense of unease and disorientation, despite the mundaneness of the railroad journey. Partly it comes from Bujold's tense expression and body language. Yes, she has lost her mother; but what else is the matter? In a series of very brief (almost jump-cut) images, we see and hear the following: the unnervingly loud train clattering through snowy woods speeding behind the girl's apprehensive profile; a male passenger glances embarrassingly at her tooshort skirt (she is far from the big city now and getting further by the minute), the ticket-collector comes through, the guard announces the (French) names of the next stops, her paperback stays shut till she takes out the summoning te legram, a hamlet slides by, telegraph wires cross and recross, the pearly cold sea heaves beyond the spruces with snow still rushing behind her set features, she imagines her home--her mother's bedroom (presumably), a wave breaking on the village jetty, a menacing stare, that makes her cry out, from an old man who later turns out to be her Uncle Matt--the train bell tolls, she shuts her eyes in dread. This opening sequence lasts for less than two minutes, so the reader can see why--even though I've had to some extent to subordinate its syntax to my own-- I said at the beginning that the elliptical quality of Isabel was inseparable from its cinematic qualities. I think all I can now do is to summarise the narrative as it unfolds to Isabel's own consciousness, since, as with other stories of the gradual revelation of long-buried secrets-the CEdipus, for example, or Ghosts, much of the work's effect depends upon the gradual seeping-back of the past into the present as the appalled central character comes to real ise that the nightmare s/he is living was always there and has underlain and infected the whole of life. The railroad obviously doesn't reach as far as Isabel's fishing-village, whose isolation from civilization is repeatedly emphasized, so she is driven home in a truck through the bleak white landscape by a local man who remembers her as a little girl but who oddly drops her a hundred yards or so from the old-fashioned farmhouse and drives off without seeing her in. The women cleaning in preparation for the wake and funeral look up in unwelcoming (almost startled) surprise, as if they had seen a ghost, when Isabel carries her cases through the front door; and saying that her uncle Matt is unwell and lying down upstairs, they direct her to the parlour where her mother is laid out in an open coffin, her face the colour of lead. …

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