A Film Review by Frances Devlin-Glass
Verdigris (1923), Directed and written by Patricia Kelly and starring Geraldine McAlinden and Maya O’Shea. Cinematography by Tania Freimuth.
Verdigris is a gentle film about violent men, and it takes us on a slow journey of revelation. The title is a poetic evocation of the toll time takes on a metal like copper, making beauty out of a destructive chemical process. At one stage in the film, the older woman poses in a verdigris outfit and the effect is transformational and the product of the interaction she has with another woman.
A bourgeois newly retired woman (Marian played by Geraldine McAlinden) has to make a lot of space for a husband she did not see quite as much of before her retirement. It’s brilliantly and efficiently imaged by her sitting on the arm of a sofa to wolf the dinner she’s prepared for him, while he occupies the entire dining table covered by his toy soldiers and battle scenarios. His controlling behaviour is increasingly sinister and dangerous.
To escape his orbit, she secretly takes a job distributing and collecting census forms in a hostile part of Dublin. The exchanges between her and a young woman (Jewel, played by Maya O’Shea) are fast and furious and unaccommodating of the unconscious markers of her class difference – her accent, her clothes, her perceived superiority. In the process, she meets an underage prostitute, Jewel, living alone and on the wild side, frequently damaged by the men she services. Her mother has abandoned her. They are an unlikely combo and Marian has to work hard to break down the suspiciousness of this damaged woman. Her genuine care and concern, often rebuffed, and her openness to new experiences, effects this miracle.
The film is subtle and nuanced, and the focus continually changes as it prosecutes its ambitous agenda. Not only do we get a gritty account of what it is that pleases Jewel in her ability to meet her own sexual needs through her occupation, but we also realise how very vulnerable she is as a sole practitioner on the rough streets, and how desperately naïve she is. Her ability to compartmentalise sex and relationships is seriously challenged – we see her roughed up three times in the film. And that’s not all the film has to offer: Marian learns how damaged she’s been from Jewel by continually effacing herself in the face of her husband’s none-too-subtle insults and put-downs. We see how unhappiness in her marriage has undermined her confidence, made her invisible and self-hating and expecting that men will find her repellent. Jewel is instrumental in changing Marian’s self-perception by dressing her in verdigris satin and eliciting her inner Siren. They have much to offer one another and the tender scenes in Jewel’s little boudoir when Marian teaches her how to cook are moving. These little acts of love are reciprocated by Jewel teaching Marian how to use her phone to protect herself when the chips are down. Oddly, Jewel does have some defensive measures in place, but is not as adept as Marian becomes, and does not seem to take her own advice, so is vulnerable to the kind of pathetic man who has convinced himself he is her boyfriend. They constitute a mutual improvement society. Jewel’s local knowledge is indispensable to Marian in ensuring the census forms are filled in and returned. Hostility to the government is a conditioned reflex in Jewel’s hood. And Marian’s unawareness of how deeply it runs almost overturns the relationship.
Marian is a gifted interferer, and tries to reunite Jewel with her estranged mother, and we learn only gradually of the sorrows that underlie her apparently comfortable middle-class existence. Geraldine McAlinden excelled in the scene in which she tells Jewel of her husband not wanting kids and losing a child four weeks dead in her womb. Jewel’s ecstatic dance was poetry in motion, revealing as it did the longing for beauty and expressiveness in her life.
The contrast between the bourgeois lifestyle enjoyed by Marian and Nigel, and the grim marginal tenements of Jewel’s neighbourhood (one of which she transforms into a love nest for her own pleasure and that of her clients) is very effective. And the camera loves the faces and bodies of these two women, transforming them at key moments into the beautiful and liberated bodies and persons that they are.
I loved this film as it picks up heavy issues in a benign but never oversimplifying way. I enjoyed the frank and free exchanges of strong opinions and the colourful insults (at one stage Jewel defensively calls Marian ‘lardy arse’- she’s a compulsive eater); the feminist take on the positive aspects of prostitution and the blunt questioning of the personal risks that working girls take; I enjoyed how it takes coercive control seriously and how the female collaboration turns the tables on Nigel; and that both women could be moved by the other. It’s a feel-good take on some tough issues and it ends quite extraordinarily (no spoilers). It’s a worthy recipient of a number of major accolades, including Best Independent Film at the Galway Film Fleadh and Best Film at the Irish Film Festival in London.
Frances Devlin-Glass
Frances is a member of the Tinteán collective.
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