Review of "The Secret History" by Donna Tartt

 

I was drawn in to this story about a group of over-privileged white kids at a posh and slightly useless American college...the narrator has got in on a scholarship so he's not so over-privileged, but he's pretending that he's as rich as the rest of them. The secret of the title is about some terrible things that they do, and I won't spoil by disclosing...I was captivated for the most part, even as I was repelled by the characters and what they'd done. But it rather falls apart in the last fifty pages. It felt to me like she'd got bored with them and it, which can't possibly be right because it shows all the signs of being put together and revised over a long period, and she is a really good write. But still, that's how it felt.

Review of Olga

Film about Olga, a young woman athlete who is on verge of being selected for the Ukraine national gymnastics team, but gets the opportunity to take out Swiss nationality and train in Switzerland instead - her now-dead dad was Swiss. Her mum is an investigative journalist exposing corruption in the government and we see her survive an assassination attempt while she's taking her daughter out for an evening. Olga goes to Switzerland, becomes Swiss, but is then transfigured by the unfolding political crisis in her home country and doesn't know where she belongs any more. Lots of hard-to-watch gymnastic training.

Watched at Lansdown Film Club, and I knew it was good because I forgot about how uncomfortable the seats were.

Review of The Field

Amazing, clever, emotionally laden Irish film about conflict over the ownership of a field in a poverty-stricken rural village. Bull McCabe, the farmer who has worked the field for all of his life even though he rents it from a widow in the village, wants to buy it for what he considers a fair price, but a visiting American has more cash and is determined to buy it himself. Lots of overlaying tragedy in the relationships between the farmer and his wife, and with his son, played by a younger Sean Bean. 

I think it's set in the 1930s, though it's not easy to tell. It might be the 1950s. Electricity has just arrived in the village...there is nothing else technological, and no reference to outside events, that might help to place the exact time. But the Famine is still a living memory and source of pain. There's a really strange ambivalent attitude to those who emigrated and left their land...are they traitors or victims? Similarly the tinkers who are in the village are regarded as having lost 'caste' because they are the descendants of people who abandoned their land.

I was slightly put off at the beginning by the murkiness of the colours, but I came to realise that anything else would have been wrong. It's a dark film and needs to be dark visually. This is like a Greek tragedy, but with protagonists who are poor.

We watched this at a community arts centre in Kenmare, a tiny town in the west of Ireland, where villages like the one depicted are all around, at a free showing by a community group that provided meals on wheels to the poor and isolated. There was free tea and cake too...we made a donation that was not expected and received with much thanks.