Pilgrim Hill (Gerard Barrett 2012)

Gerard Barrett's low-key Pilgrim Hill was a somewhat unexpected hit during 2013, the Brown Bag Films writer's debut feature not only receiving its international premiere at the Telluride Film Festival, but earning him its Great Expectation award. Add that to the Bingham Ray award at the Galway Film Fleadh and places at the London BFI Film Festival and Busan International Film Festival, as well as an IFTA Rising Star award, and the film's success appears wildly disproportionate to its ultra-low-budget origins. Costing a meagre 4,500 [euro] (1) and filmed in just seven days in Barrett's native Kerry, part of the film's subtle appeal lies in its resolutely downbeat approach to its material. Joe Mullins (Killinascully) stars as Jimmy Walshe, a middle-aged, under-educated farmer eking out a living on a small farm on the eponymous Hill, where the natural sounds and measured seasonal rhythms of rural life dominate, and emotional connection remains elusive. Jimmy clears the rushes from his boggy land, cleans and maintains his pebble-dashed bungalow and outbuildings, feeds and milks his small herd of cattle, with the same deliberate care with which he tends to his bedridden father. This is no Rousseau-inspired bucolic idyll, nor does it call to the romantic representations of rural Ireland of The Quiet Man. Jimmy's silence speaks of regret and loneliness, the demands of his solitary life eased only by the occasional match or funeral, his closest companions the cows to whom he deals out unsentimental, companionable pats. A painstaking measuring-out of time dominates, Barrett's--often silent--focus primarily on the accumulation of moments, the minutiae of Jimmy's daily life. The leisurely pace resolutely refuses to fetishise the Irish countryside or the unfolding of 'natural' time, placing its passage of time not as 'serene', so much as 'anaesthetic', and solidifying gradually into a picture of rural Ireland in crisis. In one sense, this is a deeply personal catastrophe of identity. Jimmy, the product of an unhappy arranged marriage, his mother's early suicide, and his father's resulting bitterness, admits that he kinda feel[s] trapped sometimes with it all. The practical obligations of farming and the familial obligations which concern him are not presented as 'timeless' inevitabilities, but are contrasted with Jimmy's more contemporary awareness that other options could once, perhaps, have been available to him. In this sense, Jimmy occupies a hinterland between modern and (implied as more restrictive, and emotionally brutalising) traditional visions of Irish masculinity. Although he frames this generational transition in explicitly personal terms, speaking of his regret at not standing up to his father and talking of his wasted longing for a family of his own--specifically a daughter, which would mark a kind of symbolic end to the patriarchal dominance of the countryside--the generational issues invoked here are not Jimmy's alone. Barrett's Kerry is almost exclusively occupied by men, and old men at that; bidding on calves at the mart, in the pub casually conversing about the weather. Jimmy's shyness isolates him from them too, but the cumulative impression is one of rural Ireland embedded in a kind of transitional limbo, one which seems as defined in masculine terms as much as in socioeconomic ones. This is seen clearly in two elements. The first is the pointed distinction made between Jimmy and the brash Tommy, who is ridin' the dole train for want of better options. While emigration to Canada or Dubai is his only real future, Tommy's youthful naivety--suggesting that the barely literate Jimmy should abandon the farm to go to college --signals a clear rejection of traditional rural norms. So too does his description of Jimmy's turf-cutting as caveman stuff', and his misguided attempt to engage Jimmy in a more contemporary social milieu, all conversation lost amid the banging techno and bikini-clad podium dancers of the local nightclub. …

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