Lost Lives ****
Dirs: Michael Hewitt,
Diarmuid Lavery. Documentary with the voices of: Kenneth Branagh, Ciaran Hinds,
Susan Lynch, Brid Brennan. 93 mins. Cert: 15
Few films released in 2019
have seemed this timely, this urgent. Documentarists Michael Hewitt and
Diarmuid Lavery have come up with an immensely powerful adaptation of a
remarkable artefact: the thumping chronicle written over seven years by David
McKittrick, Seamus Kelters, Brian Feeney, Chris Thornton and David McVea, obituarising
3,700 of the lives taken during the Irish Troubles.
From the book’s first pages,
Hewitt and Lavery pull the scene-setting example of nine-year-old Patrick
Rooney, killed by an RUC bullet as he lay in bed during a riot in August 1969;
in the final moments, they addend the name of Lyra McKee, the young journalist
shot by dissident Republicans during rioting this past April. Entry by entry,
the film constructs a sorrowful history of promise extinguished – and a pointed
reminder of what lurks behind any rollback of the Good Friday Agreement.
That simple, effective
conceit is given further heft by the who’s-who of Irish acting talent recruited
to tackle the authors’ judicious phrasing. Ciaran Hinds lends the Rooney story
new, tragic life; elsewhere, the likes of Adrian Dunbar, Susan Lynch and
Kenneth Branagh sound understandably moved or appalled by the waste they
describe. (Emotion, like the past, sits close to the surface throughout.)
That variation of voices
staves off any monotony inherent in the list format, and each story opens up
some revealing front. Collectively, they provide a renewed sense of just how
widespread and all-consuming the Troubles were, how they caught up combatants
and civilians, young and old alike.
Hewitt and Lavery wouldn’t
have had to wander too far into the archives for visual evidence of the taut,
fraught Ireland of yesteryear, yet be warned: there are images here that
couldn’t have been shown on the nightly news, interrupting the detachment instilled
in the original prose.
The filmmakers fashion jolting
contrasts besides: with the enduring beauty of the Irish landscape, and with
today’s gleamingly secure pleasure palaces, built after civil war was replaced
by something like peace. Even here, though, Mark Garrett’s roaming camera
detects a certain man-made melancholy, and those words and stories keep coming
at us, their accumulated weight of detail socking the viewer in the gut and
forcing tears to the eyes. Is this a book we really want to reopen?
Lost Lives screens in selected cinemas for one night only this Wednesday (the 23rd).
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