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Rating: The Banshees of Inisherin by Martin McDonagh
The colorless Pádraic and his pilgrimage to Inisherin, between spirits and oracles, circularity, and waiting for death.
Murakami Haruki has aptly described the feelings experienced during a forced and traumatic separation from a friendship, when a friendship suddenly ends, due to a unilateral decision, sharp and without apparent reasons. A severance. Like the amputation of a limb.
In his "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage," the great Japanese author outlines the contours of a protagonist, a young university-aged boy, who repeatedly contemplates suicide following the abandonment by his friends. Tsukuru Tazaki is presented as, indeed, "colorless": both for the peculiarity of his surname, which (in Japanese) contained no color, unlike those of his friends, and for his personality. In fact, Tsukuru, much like Murakami's other characters (e.g., the unforgettable Watanabe from Norwegian Wood), is portrayed as a somewhat unremarkable young man, with the sole curious passion for railway stations, and he himself considered "boring" even in appearance.
Anyone who has seen McDonagh's new film will understand the reason for the parallelism: the protagonist, Pádraic, brilliantly played by Colin Farrell, is dumped by his best friend Colm, who justifies this by saying that the former friend was "boring."
"You didn't do anything to me, it's just that I don't like you anymore."
Murakami uses this fitting metaphor:
"A cable hundreds of kilometers long stretched to the limit by gigantic winches. And through that cable came a mysterious message to him, day and night. An indecipherable noise that, like a violent wind passing through the forest, varied in intensity, sometimes drilling into his ears"
Pádraic must have heard the same noise, and anyone who has lived through a similar situation knows that Murakami's metaphor is accurate.
In fact, Pádraic/Farrell finds no peace; but the film doesn't present good and bad - at most, one might feel a justified and healthy hatred toward the policeman character -, and McDonagh's exploration of his two protagonists is very complex, on a psychological, existential, and ultimately political level.
The Banshees of Inisherin is a film that, although very simple in structure and dramaturgy, contains within itself implications and dilemmas of great complexity: is it possible for a person to overcome the trauma of a - as mentioned, unilateral - breakup of a friendship from one day to the next? Understand and accept the motivations of the part that decided to separate? Can that deep bond, which forms between two friends, be severed, or is it destined, even in rancor, to last forever?
Amused to death
The film, starting from this, deeply delves into the malaise of a circular life, a flat circle: routine, the pub, friends, habits, the long wait for the inevitable. The awareness of one's mortal and evanescent nature, the fact that once the last breath is exhaled, no one will remember your acts of kindness thereafter, but only art can endure over time and thus transcend. To pass down a legacy, a testament of our brief passage on this earth.
It is an extraordinary film about friendship and depression, traditions, folklore, and the sense of affection, where even animals are, rightly and finally, treated as close relatives.
And it's a film that speaks of the deep nature of a people, the Irish, who once they stopped (for a second, of course) fighting their eternal common enemy the English, began to fight a fratricidal war. A people divided between Catholic Republicans and Protestant Unionists, who can switch from love to hatred in the space of a moment, in the space of a friendship broken and interrupted without any true motivations other than the pursuit of an inner peace ultimately impossible to find.
A very tender and very bitter film, with two exceptional protagonists, marking McDonagh's definitive maturity as an author. A work that leaves a lot, with many truly unforgettable and touching moments.
A film that deserves every praise.
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