Parky At the Pictures (18/7/2025)

(Reviews of Four Letters of Love; and The Road to Patagonia)

FOUR LETTERS OF LOVE.

Having previously explored the complexities of love and parent-child bonds in Lena: The Bride of Ice (2008) and Let Me Go (2017), director Polly Steele recaps similar themes in Four Letters of Love, which has been adapted by Niall Williams from his own bestselling 1997 novel. There are enough clichés and caricatures to shake a shillelagh at and one can't help wondering how different this might have been hard Helena Bonham Carter been able to fund it as a starring vehicle around the time the book appeared. Nevertheless, the West Coast scenery is glorious and the ensemble acting couldn't be better.

In voiceover, writer Nicholas Coughlan (Finn O'Shea) reflects upon the upheavals, portents, coincidences, and miracles that shaped his destiny. Back in 1971, he was still at school in Dublin, while his father, William (Pierce Brosnan), was an unassuming civil servant married to the younger, Bette (Imelda May). One day, however, a letter-shaped patch of light formed on William's blotter and he took this as a message from God to abandon his current lifestyle and become a painter. Bette is appalled that he should take such a decisive step without consulting her. But she is even more bereft when William announces that he can't find paint at home and is heading west in search of inspiration.

At the same time as this, Isabel Gore (Ann Skelly) is so fizzing with life that she urges older brother Sean (Dónal Finn) to play as fast as he can on his tin whistle so she can dance on the island rocks that look across to the Galway mainland. However, Sean suffers a fit and Isabel blames herself and tries to put off crossing the water to start at a convent school. Mother Margaret (Helena Bonham Carter) insists she goes and urges teacher father, Muiris (Gabriel Byrne) to give her a pep talk on the ferry. But he can tell from the frosty welcome afforded by the mother superior that his free-spirited, red-haired daughter is going to struggle to fit it.

After several months away, William returns to Dublin and Nicholas hopes that his arrival will herald a new normalcy, as his mother has been suffering with her mental health since his father upped sticks. While he is out buying a cake for tea, William discovers that his wife has died and he leaves Nicholas in the family home to continue his education while he heads back to the Atlantic coast. Desperate to know what draws his father away from him, Nicholas follows him and manages to avoid being seen on a half-empty bus and at the stop in the small town to which Isabel has returned having run away from school.

She had been helped to climb over the locked iron gate by Peader O Luing (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a lank-haired man in his early twenties who has his own car. He drives her to the beach and they spend a day together before she returns to the convent. She expects trouble after blowing out the penance candles she's been ordered to kneel beside. But, instead, the nuns treat her kindly, when they lead her to the chapel, where her `cousin' is waiting to take her to Uncle Johnny's funeral. Thrilled to see Peader again, Isabel kisses him passionately after a few drinks and a dance in the pub before she catches the ferry home.

Isabel tells her mother that she has a two-day furlough and her father the truth, as she rejoices in being home with her brother, who has lost the power of speech and is confined to a wheelchair. She had vaguely noticed Nicholas, as he descended from the bus and followed William to the dunes But he had lost sight of him and had to sprint across the beach in order to pull his father out of the waves. However, the ocean overpowers him and Nicholas is the one who has to be dragged panting to the sand. William is pleased to see his son and they dry out beside a bonfire. As he doesn't have any songs to sing, he asks Nicholas to recite some classroom Latin and they settle in for the night.

On the harbour wall across the channel, Muiris emerges from the pub after another failed attempt to write some verses and rails at God for afflicting Sean instead of himself. He is shouting something about being ready for the worst He's got to offer when Margaret comes to fetch her husband home and ask the Almighty to overlook his raving. In bed, she ponders whether Isabel is telling her the truth about her free days and chides Muiris for being the kind of man who lets her do all the housework and fails to make good on his promises to do a few odd jobs around the cottage.

Margaret is sceptical next morning when she wakes to find Muiris sitting up and putting the finishing touches to a poem in his native Irish. Inspiration is clearly in the air, as Nicholas realises that he wants to be a writer as he watches William paint in the dunes. He is pleased with his day's work and rolls up one canvas and leaves another on the easel, which he leaves in a cow stall opposite a tea shop in the town. Jumping up when the heavens open, William is too late to prevent a cow and its calf from trampling his work, with only the rolled-up canvas surviving.

As they return to Dublin and William falls into despair, Isabel is expelled from the school and she goes in search of Peader in the pub to break the news. His mother, Aine (Mary O'Driscoll), warns her that her son is a deadbeat who has left a trail of broken hearts behind him. But Isabel is grateful for a place to stay and a job at the small fabric shop that Peader owns. Nicholas is similarly thankful when William's old work colleague, John Flannery (Pat Shortt), offers to buy a painting to donate to a poetry competition. His father had refused the money, but Nicholas knows they have no other source of income.

One day, while he's at school, William daubs the walls in a burst of creativity that is brought to a tragic halt by a raging fire. As Nicholas explains in voiceover, he never knew for certain whether there had been an electrical fault or whether God had somehow told William that his life's work was done. Either way, Nicholas considers it sad that nothing his father had ever done had mattered and he moves in with John while pondering what to do next. On learning that William's last painting had been won by Muiris, he decides to head west after lying under a streetlight with his father's ghost after an unexpected snows flurry had hit Dublin.

Meanwhile, Margaret has popped over to the mainland to check that Isabel isn't pregnant. She suppresses a smile when her daughter insists she loves Paeder and reminds her that all women need an immense reserve of love at the start of a relationship in order to keep it going through a lifetime of frustrations and disappointments. Swayed by her mother's words, Isabel asks Paeder to tell her he loves her, but he proposes instead after apologising for not being the greatest catch in the world. Aine informs Isabel that her son is crippled by self-doubt, but she agrees to marry him, although she prays that God will cure Sean as a sign of whether the match is made in heaven or not.

Nicholas arrives in the town on the day of Isabel's wedding. He hears the bells toll, as he asks a couple of scurrying altar boys the way to the Gore house. Margaret has just returned with Sean and she is glad of an excuse to fetch Muiris away from the reception. He is happily dancing with Isabel, who is already having doubts about Paeder, who props himself up against a wall with a pint of Guinness before taking up his guitar to serenade his embarrassed bride with his own composition, `Saraphina'. Back at the cottage, Nicholas sits with Sean, whose hands suddenly start to move. He asks the stranger to help him out of his chair and Nicholas is treated like a hero when Muiris and Margaret walk in to see their son cured.

Muiris gives Nicholas the painting in gratitude and invites him to stay as long as he likes. Isabel is fascinated by him when she comes for Sunday lunch, without Paeder, who has returned to the mainland with his mother. Sensing trouble, Margaret reminds her daughter that her place is at her husband's side. But she is too happy dancing to Sean's penny whistle to listen and she beams at Nicholas after watching her brother run unsteadily across the sun-kissed beach.

When Isabel finally leaves, Nicholas writes to her and Margaret rushes into the town to reclaim the letter from the post office. She burns it after reading its outpouring of emotions and shreds a second and buries a third, as Nicholas persists in his suit, while being baffled as to why he's not received a reply. William's ghost sits quietly in Nicholas's room, as he fills pages with words of love. When Margaret tries to enter, William slams the door and she goes to her bedside cabinet to fetch Muiris's prize-winning poem. She translates the line about coming across the water to heed a lover's call and Nicholas runs down to the beach, as Margaret tries to apologise.

As Isabel steps out of a skiff to embrace Nicholas, William and Bette wander on to the sand to watch. Muiris also appears, with Margaret and Sean not far behind. In voiceover, Nicholas tells Isabel that they were destined to be together, as the shot of the family groups standing either side of the lovers melds into William's prophetic painting.

It's a lovely final image and one that goes a long way towards atoning for the fact that this handsomely heartfelt saga is more an upmarket melodrama than a work of cinematic art. Damien Elliott's photography couldn't be improved, whether it's conveying the dead-end Dublin ambience, basking in the beauty of the landscape (which is actually Donegal and Antrim), or capturing the glints of sunlight through Ann Skelly's tousled red curls. Limning both Maureen O'Hara and Saoirse Ronan, her eager performance is also admirable, even though Isabel is such a stereotypical character. Pierce Brosnan and Gabriel Byrne are likewise on form, although they do much to reinforce the Syngean aura that can make some of Williams's dialogue sound rather pretentious.

Interestingly, by sticking to her trusted screen persona and playing down the Oirishness (like composer Anne Nikitin), Helena Bonham Carter gives by far the best performance, as Margaret keeps house with bustling efficiency while regretting the youthful folly that convinced her that Muiris's prolific versifying would remain a given and that her life would always be filled with love and poetry. Her common sense puts the film on a par with Pat Collins's exemplary adaptation of John McGahern's That They May Face the Rising Sun (2023). But Williams's inexperience as a screenwriter means that he relies on too many literary devices to keep the parallel narratives on track and forgets to explain the cosmic connections that take a painting across the country via a poetry competition that goes completely unmentioned by anyone in Galway, including its winner. Moreover, Williams's dialogue often sounds better suited to the stage or the page than to 1970s Ireland - for all its supposed behind-the-timesness.

Despite, for the most part, creditably managing to keep implausibility at bay, Steele's direction is also occasionally a bit heavy-handed, particularly during the scenes following Sean's miraculous (but absurdly unpersuasive) recovery, when everyone starts behaving busily like extras in an amdram production of The Playboy of the Western World. Yet, while this is a story that offers little resistance to either scrutiny or cynicism, it's staged and performed with a touching sincerity that means it gets further under the skin than it should.

THE ROAD TO PATAGONIA.

Compiled from 16 years-worth of home movies, Matty Hannon's debut feature, The Road to Patagonia, reached UK cinemas a couple of weeks before the furore erupted about Raynor Winn's memoir, The Salt Path. The core stories have much in common and those who enjoyed watching Gillian Anderson and Jason Isaacs traipsing the South West Coast Path should seek out an odyssey that took the truth-seeking Australian surfer from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego via the Indonesian islands that shaped his worldview.

Having dropped out of university after reading a book about the shaman of the Mentawai islands of western Sumatra, ecology graduate Hannon had spent five years in the rainforest learning about sustainability and tree and river spirits from Aman Lepon Salakirrat and his clan, who had conned the authorities into thinking they had converted to Catholicism in order to follow their traditional beliefs in peace. Returning to Melbourne, Hannon had taken an office job and was soon diagnosed with anxiety and depression. In a bid to re-align himself, he customised a motorbike, lashed his board to the sidecar, and set out to surf the 50,000 km coast of the Americas from tip to tail.

After scary experiences with bears and wolves and the loss of his tent, Hannon was taught to see the positives by artist Robert Baty. However, he left for British Columbia with a sense of guilt that his colonised Irish ancestors had subjugated themselves in Australia and he fears that capitalism and consumerism are the new forces eroding ancient cultures and distancing indigenous peoples from their lands and spirits.

On Vancouver Island, Hannon meets permaculture farmer Heather Hillier and admits falling for her, while learning about her plans to change her community one organic vegetable at a time. Promising to keep in touch, he heads into the United States and rides big waves while in awe of a landscape that has taken millions of years to evolve. He is also struck by how civilisations across the globe are united by animism and wonders how it can be promoted in a time of ecological crisis to restore a sense of balance to society.

Overcoming the theft of his bike in Mexico, Hannon spends months applying for insurance payouts, while sleeping on the floor of a San Diego surf shop opened by a couple of pals. Five more biker buddies show up and entice him into joining them in Baja California, where he is delighted to be reunited with Heather, who had been worried by his morose letters. She sells her farm to buy a bike and they head south together, with Hannon having discovered that life can good in the right place with the right people. It's hardly a profound revelation, but it sums up his openness to experience and his growing awareness of the diversity of cultures and what binds them.

The pair pause in Guatemala to ponder the fate of the Mayan civilisation that succumbed to the aggrandising ambitions of its rulers. The furrow brows in a bid to relate this to the modern world, while Heather (who has acquired the nickname `Bomber' and is now co-narrating) meets some Zapatista farmers to learn about their collectivisation initiatives. Bu they're soon off again to sample the Amazonian rainforest, which inspires Hannon to wax lyrical about the chasm between modern urban living and the wisdom that has been lost by drifting away from the ancient beliefs and practices that allow jungle tribes to live as one with Nature. It's poignant and heartfelt, but the Enyaesque warbling on the soundtrack makes it all feel touchily-feelily new agey and also rather preachy.

Coming back down to earth, the now besotted travellers decide to sell the bikes and buy four horses to reduce their reliance on petrol and their carbon footprint. In Pichilemu in Chile, they meet a couple of Aussie cowboys and they learn to ride before discovering their ignorance of horses might be problematic, especially as the animals are spooked by the surfboards being tied to their backs. Hannon and Heather admit to having their first row, while she concedes to being scared of the horses. As they find ways around their problems, they befriend surfer

Ramon Navarro, who has just helped conserve the iconic Punta de Lobos break. Further on, they hear from Vivianna Naweban how the Mapuche resisted the Spanish conquistadores and are still having to fight to retain control over their ancestral lands.

In between times, Heather and Hannon live the dream. Following unmapped coastal trails, they get to see the Chilean Pacific coast in all its rugged beauty and live off the land at one with their environment. Progress is slow, but they have become used to their horses and keep finding corking places to surf. However, they find themselves in pulp mill country, where pine forests have taken over the landscape and, after Hannon loses the GPS device, the horses have to go a day without water and precious little grazing before they luck upon a freshwater torrent down a cliff face.

They laugh at the horses drinking out of a holy water font and marvel at how trusting they are when they left to roam free. But their inexperience at caring for their mounts leaves questions to be answered and there is little exhilaration to be had at the sight of the golden hour sunsets or Hannon zipping along a perfect pipe while Heather whoops on the soundtrack. But all is not as it seems, as she is concerned for the oldest and smallest of the horses and they spend a good deal of time arguing about its welfare. When she decides to return to Canada, they agree to sell the horses, only to discover that the friendly farmer who claims he wants Salvador, Pichi, Blacky, and Harimau for his children really intends shooting them and selling them to a butcher.

Luckily, they have friends in the Andes (as you do) and they agree to take them after a quick mobile phone call. It's cold and tempers fray, but Hannon is glad the detour keeps them together for a little longer. They meet Rodolfo Rubio, who tells them of his ordeal under the Pinochet regime and how he fears that his lands will be lost when a hydro-electric plant is built. In another Mapuche settlement, Alberto Nahuel explains how horses are revered before he declares that he spent over 600 days in prison for resisting the hydro-electric scheme that threatens the rivers, pastures, and even the volcano that rises into the clouds. It's stirring subtitled stuff and packs much more of a punch than the unfeigned, but rather hollow musings of the privileged white tourists.

We're not told how the couple know Greta and Ale Matos, but the horses seem content to have reached their final destination in Pucón and Heather also sounds relieved to be returning to her independent life after hitching her wagon. Hannon has a trembling lip speech to camera before he presses on to Ushuaia in Argentina with the realisation that Heather had never really shared his Patagonian goal. He trudges on foot into the mountains, but doesn't show us whether he went as far south as he could go. Instead, he tells us that the journey had taught him not to be afraid of making mistakes and he had returned to British Columbia with a bunch of handpicked flowers.

A coda informs us that Harimau lived a few more years before dying at the age of around 40 in Pucón, where the other three horses remain happily. As for Heather, she spent four years living in a caravan on a small farm before coming to Unceded Gumbaynggirr Country to become the mother of Colt Kestrel Hannon. What his father was doing during this period is not disclosed.

Anyone familiar with the kind of travelogues that form the backbone of adventure film festival programmes will recognise that this as a textbook example of the form. Snippets of footage snatched on the trail are pieced together to establish the nature of the terrain and the pace of progress through it, while voiceovers confide the life lessons that are being learned by the journeying film-maker. Hannon is a charismatic archetype and the naivété of his ruminations suggests abundant decency. There is also something undeniably sweet about his romance with Heather, especially as they are prepared to hint at the rockier side.

But, while Hannon comes across as a good bloke, he offers only superficial insights into the cultures he encounters and the myriad problems they face, while there's more sincerity than depth to his observations about the need for 21st-century humans to become aware of the issues on which the entire future of the planet depends. Some of the reflections can seem a bit trite and tacky as a consequence, with the mawkish mood being reinforced by the musaky folk songs composed by Daniel Norgren. He and co-editors Michael Balson and Harriet Clutterbuck also give relatively little space to Heather to express her own views and air her misgivings, despite the fact that Hannon patently adores her.

It's interesting in this regard to read a review published online by the Development Studies Association of Australia, which accuses Hannon of hypocrisy because `he reproduces exploitative practices, such as exoticizing Indigenous communities, using living beings as tools (and being shocked when they resist exploitation), and replicating gender roles and consumerism'. Later, the piece states: `Like many from the Global North, Hannon is surprised by the imperfections of Global South countries, yet benefits from the ability to travel and work globally without acknowledging his privilege.' As the reviewer concludes, `Hannon fails to recognise his privilege and responsibility in the world, replicating exploitative patterns and showing inconsistency between his decisions and his desire for a "nature-based" life.'

It's hard to disagree, even though Hannon's heart may be in the right place. Despite providing a platform for the peoples he meets, he is also guilty of exoticising Indigenous cultures and of identifying his own dominant culture as the standard. Moreover, surfing with a clear conscience in such circumstances smacks of a sense of arrogant entitlement that was almost certainly the last thing on Hannon and Hillier's mind, as they enjoyed their trip of a lifetime - and then went home!