Passion on a Darkling Plain

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

CAL Directed by Pat O'Connor; Screenplay by Bernard Mac Laverty

All twinkly and crinkly, spouting sentimental songs and blarney-encrusted stories, the face of a certain kind of jolly theatrical performer used to be referred to as "the map of Ireland." For a revised and updated emotional cartography, audiences are advised to stare long and hard into the physiognomy of John Lynch. A young actor of Roman Catholic stock who grew up in Ulster, he plays the title role in Cal, a brooding, subtle film that dares to make the only valid response to the endless violence of life in Northern Ireland today: a sort of strangled horror.

Sallow and sharp-featured, his unkempt hair a veil that flops down to hide the anguished confusion that haunts his eyes, Lynch's Cal is superficially a Belfast archetype. He is an unemployed adolescent from a broken home, trying to draw a curtain of rock music between himself and the terror-ridden streets, where glibly impassioned rhetoric is punctuated by the sound of explosions. Still, there is time on his hands and an emotional need to fill, so he drifts, convictionless, into the I.R.A.'s orbit, driving getaway cars for their "revolutionary" crimes. One of these forays results in the murder of a police constable named Morton (and the unintended maiming of his father) on the farm three generations of the family share. Why the man was marked for death was not explained to Cal, and political generalities after the fact cannot rationalize the dreadful specificity of what he witnessed. For this odd boy out, the murder becomes an enigmatic, recurrent nightmare.

When the policeman's widow, a librarian named Marcella (Helen Mirren), is pointed out to Cal, he begins slyly, shyly to stalk her. Whether he seeks love or absolution--or merely to assess the damage done another victim of the act he abetted--he could not say. And the movie is resolute in its refusal to speak for him or, indeed, for anyone caught in the narrative web it constructs out of loosely woven naturalistic fibers. As it demonstrates through its minor figures the stupefaction that permanent conflict imposes on its victims, the film permits Cal to draw closer and closer to the older woman, upsetting the silent compromise she was on the verge of making with life. He gets a job on the farm and then a place to live there and, finally, becomes her lover before his inescapable past re-encircles him.

Cal is one of the least articulate movies ever made. Its dialogue is deliberately banal, half-formed thoughts trying to force their way through a screen of cliches. And it is often murmured in tones an American auditor may have trouble apprehending.

But this is a conscious choice on the part of Writer Bernard Mac Laverty, adapting his own novel, Director Pat O'Connor, whose first feature this is, and their exemplary actors. This, they are saying, is the sound of repression. They are also saying that when terror establishes itself as a habit, it passes beyond the power of reason to understand it or words to explain it. In the world they place before us, action is no longer character. Numbness is.

There is too a kind of resignation in the manner with which Cal and Marcella reach out to each other. They seem to understand implicitly the humane gesture's futility in a gray-skied climate where the cold has seeped into everyone's bones. But if these lovers can make contact only briefly and tentatively, the film--a passionate whisper from a darkling plain--takes a firm grasp on one's attention. It is a very fine thing. --By Richard Schickel