Aubrey Malone
My Name is Emily (12A)
“There’s a sadness in this country,” says the eponymous Emily in this quirky, life-affirming film, “a sadness it cannot hide.” She’s lost her mother in a car accident. Her father survived it but had a nervous breakdown afterwards.
Such a breakdown resulted in some outlandish behaviour. He started doing things like ranting on about the molecular structure of grass, and daubing a message on the wall of his house that said, “A fact is just a point of view.”
When he’s placed in a psychiatric institution, Emily is left with foster parents she doesn’t like. As the film – set in Dublin – begins, she’s a withdrawn schoolgirl who’s also something of a know-all.
It’s her 16th birthday and she hasn’t got the annual card from her father (George Webster). This causes her to fret. When a British classmate, Ardan (Michael Smiley), takes a fancy to her she asks him to accompany her to the North, where her father is incarcerated, and help “spring” him from captivity.
So far so weird. But once these parameters are laid down the film settles into its groove as a gentle “road” movie as well as a budding romance between Emily and Ardan. Amazingly, it manages to unite all these diverse strands seamlessly.
Tecnology
This becomes even more amazing when one learns that its director, Simon Fitzmaurice, is paralysed with motor neurone disease except for the ability to move his eyes. He was able to oversee the production through the incredible technology of iris recognition software.
There are some contrivances in the plot. The convenient car, for instance, that Ardan’s granny produces to help the odd couple on their journey, and the gun that just “happens” to be in the glove compartment for Ardan to chase away some local ‘yobboes’ who are threatening himself and Emily when they camp at a beach en route.
Such blips aside, this is a sweet little film that charms you more and more as it goes on, right up to the point near the end when there’s a stunning revelation about Webster.
Evanna Lynch shows just the right mix of innocence and experience as the confused adolescent growing into womanhood. Smiley, a young man who looks like Leonardo DiCaprio and talks like Jack Dee, plays off her with amiable bewilderment.
Warm-hearted tale
The film is both moving and funny, a warm-hearted tale about a world that sometimes doesn’t understand, and a man who has to accept that sometimes it’s not the world that’s out of step with him as much as he who’s out of step with it.
The analogy we’re proffered for this predicament – by Barry McGovern, playing a psychiatrist – is the ancient Platonic one of a group of cave-dwellers who shun the light in favour of a world of shadows, but perhaps a more appropriate image would be that of Icarus, the ill-fated mythological character who burned his wings after flying too close to the sun.
Very Good ****