Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy reflect on matters of cultural identity in this hopscotching journey through time, space and the Irish Sea.
There’s a little aside at about the midpoint of Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy’s essay/diary/dream film, The Future Tense, where we see some comically strobed footage of the late thesp Paul Scofield having his head lopped off while playing Sir Thomas More in Fred Zinnemann’s 1966 historical epic, A Man For All Seasons. The reason we see this is because we’ve just paid a visit to the Catholic church that Joe’s parents got married in, and there, on a little plinth, is the same Thomas More statue that can be seen in a photo taken on the big day.
It feels apt that Schofield makes a cameo appearance, because – to go off on my own digression for a moment – he went on from the plush Old Hollywood finery of the Zinnemann picture to provide the narration for two great films by cine-psychogeographer extraordinaire, Patrick Keiller. These were 1994’s London, and 1997’s Robinson In Space. As with The Future Tense, these were works driven by their maker’s fascination with landscape, locality and literary allusion, a desire to mine entertainment from plunging down the rabbit hole of research and creativity and, in most cases, dragging a ripping yarn back to the surface.
The film sees Lawlor and Molloy delivering a tag-team to-camera monologue (they had actors waiting in the wings, but Covid scuppered their plans, they claim) which, initially, details a flight they took from London to Dublin for a location recce. As the drowsy boredom that comes from peering out a plane window and into the clouds takes hold, the pair begin to reel off freeform thoughts and ideas, mainly to do with the added symbolism this trip has accrued since the geopolitical own-goal of Brexit.
Lawlor and Molloy tell us that they once made a decision to get the Hell out of Ireland in the 1980s because, at that point, the negatives far out-weighed the positives. But now, with the UK currently doing its level best to win the Shithole of the Year award, maybe it’s time to consider reconnecting with roots and working out if the reasons they left in the first place still hold water.
Yet this initial flurry of identity-driven anxiety cleverly segues into a two-pronged exploration of the making of a new feature (about the Axminster-born society darling turned IRA bandit, Rose Dugdale), and the heartbreaking drama of tumultuous family histories, focusing on the mental health problems of Joe’s late mother, Helen. Now, were I to detail all the discursive footnotes in this film, we’d be here all night, but with these two expertly interwoven tales we cover scads of Irish cultural and political history, as well as searching, often wryly comic pronouncements on the psychological impact of emigration and immigration.
While we daisy-chain across subjects, continents and timeframes, there are also various expert interviews pepper into the mix, which offer further poetic insight into the problems that Lawlor and Molloy can’t quite put their finger on. It’s a searching film that is one minute endearingly daft, and the next bracingly sincere. Yet, like its makers (you hope!), it’s a film you come away from with a revitalised sense of the world and the questions currently being asked by thousands if not millions of people across the globe.
Published 16 Aug 2023
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