INTERMISSION ***

And so we cross the Atlantic (for once), going for that rare event – a Great Britain and Ireland double bill [NB. I reviewed this together with THE MOTHER], part of the invaluable European Film Festival. The Brits are still underachieving a bit when it comes to film production – they really ought to be as big as Hollywood, with English as the world’s lingua franca – but the Irish have become a force to reckon with in recent years, helped by a government that’s pumped money (mostly EU money) into film initiatives. InterMission is a very Irish comedy, for better and for worse.

 Irish readers will no doubt write in and call me an eejit, but there often seems something cruel and callous – a strain of gallows humour, verging on sadism – in Irish culture. Is it a history of poverty and isolation that’s made people ‘hard’? Is it all the Catholic (and lapsed-Catholic) guilt floating around? Hard to say – but let’s take some examples. The General (1998) had a man nailing another man’s hand to a pool table. Roddy Doyle’s novel Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha (1993) has a battered wife and an often battered 10-year-old narrator. These are both comedies. InterMission starts with Colin Farrell flirting with a shop clerk – then suddenly punching her in the face, breaking her nose, and stealing all the cash in her till. This too is a comedy. 

 It takes a while to adjust to the film, mostly because its detail is so unpleasant. Bosses are obnoxious, salesgirls have a bad attitude, kids are juvenile delinquents; everyone uses “fuck” as all-purpose punctuation; there’s a cop who’s worse than the villains he pursues, and a man-hating girl whose last boyfriend not only stole her money but also tied her to the bed and “did a poo on her chest” (!) before departing. This is not a world you’d want to spend much time in.

 Yet, when they’re not effing and blinding, the characters talk like Joycean scholars. “You’ve just sent me into a state of turmoil,” our hero tells his friend, so upset he can’t even finish his wholesome dinner of two brown-sauce sambos and a pint of Guinness. “Instead of mobility, I’ve increased perception,” explains a wheelchair-bound old man down at the pub. Even the nasty cop confesses to “a fondness for Celtic mysticism” – and even Farrell, as a thoroughly bad apple, has his literate moments, planning a heist that has “many a quid’s potential” or explaining the importance of being organised: “This shite, you’ve got to be Stephen fuckin’ Hawkings.”

 You might say the film unites two old Irish stereotypes: the loud, boozy scrapper and the silver-tongued blarney-man with the gift of the gab. Advance word billed it as an edgier Love, Actually – it has a similar structure of overlapping stories, most of them dealing with troubled or unrequited love – but it’s actually closer to a Guy Ritchie crime caper with real people instead of comic gangsters. You can turn up your nose at the mix of comedy and violence, or you can laugh along. All in all, it makes more sense to laugh along.

 Maybe the real key to Ireland is a lack of pretension. There’s an egalitarian, all-in-this-together vibe about InterMission, as proudly working-class as its pub grub and lusty punch-ups. When a Hollywood star like Tom Cruise joins an ensemble movie like Magnolia (1999), it’s understood he’ll have the flashiest role and generally keep his Hollywood-star dignity – but when Colin Farrell, currently one of the biggest stars on the planet, returns to his homeland for a ‘small’ film like InterMission, he happily mucks in with the others, plays a total scumbag and sings ‘I Fought The Law’ (off-key) over the closing credits. Says it all, really.