Troubles on her doorstep

In Shadow Dancer, the domestic is a metaphor for the political as an IRA volunteer betrays her family by turning MI5 informer, says Alan O’Riordan

A FILM about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, at this remove, might put viewers off: we’ve been there, on-screen and off-screen, so do we want to go back?

But Shadow Dancer has an IRA seal of approval. The film’s director James Marsh says the reception at a screening in Belfast was sympathetic and positive.

“The first person to stand up was a very feisty woman, who appeared to be, or have been, a member of the IRA and who’d been in prison,” Mr Marsh says. “She reeled off a list of Northern Irish films which she didn’t like; she thought they were stupid. But, she said, ‘I quite like yours’.” A former hunger striker was also in the audience. “He got up and asked a question and framed it by saying we’d got something essential about what it was like to be in that situation,” he says.

That “something essential” is the quality that makes Shadow Dancer worthwhile. It’s not a film about loyalty to ‘the struggle’; instead, it is a film that forces viewers to concentrate on the psychology of its characters: the domestic rather than the political; or, more accurately, the political within the domestic. Shadow Dancer examines what people do in impossible situations. It doesn’t seek to explain their motives, or even tackle the complexities of Belfast’s sectarian schisms.

The action in Shadow Dancer takes place in 1994. The embryonic peace process is dividing one Republican cell, which centres on the McVeigh family. They are Colette (Andrea Riseborough), her brothers Gerry (Aidan Gillen) and Conor (Domhnall Gleeson), and their mother (Brid Brennan).

The opening, portentous scene takes us back to a meticulously recreated 1970s. Colette’s younger brother, whom she sends on an errand in her place, is killed in a shooting between Provos and British soldiers. We flash forward to 1994, and Colette is an unlikely terrorist, carrying a suspicious package on the London Underground. She doesn’t go through with her murderous task; she abandons the bomb. MI5 take her in, where she is given the choice of prison, away from her son, or being an informer; she chooses the latter, cranking up the film’s unbearable unease.

In those first two scenes, Marsh creates a mood of foreboding that never lets up. In the Tube scene, we meet in Riseborough a remarkable actor, able to carry the psychological complexity of the film. “We threw her into the first scene on the London Underground, where we had very little control of the situation,” Mr Marsh says. “Those were real trains we were hopping on and off; there were real people on those trains. We didn’t control the carriages or the platforms or the trains, or anything. And we shot it in one, long take. That was day one, scene one: Andrea’s first challenge, and she did it so brilliantly.”

Riseborough brings to the role a mix of inscrutability and expressiveness: we try to read her face, but are not always able. “It’s exactly what the character is going through,” Mr Marsh says. “She has to, in a sense, conceal herself from her family and yet let the audience in somehow. That’s a very hard thing to do, but she does it fantastically well.”

Colette’s handler in MI5 is played by Clive Owen — a Bondish actor, but playing a George Smiley-type character. “The film,” Mr Marsh says, “has a certain naturalism to it. That’s why I liked the script. It’s not full of contrived set-pieces, or loud bangs or car chases. It’s trying to get a heightened sense of what it was really like. People in MI5 didn’t work in high-tech offices, they didn’t have gadgets. They work in this shabby, dreary place and Clive Owen wears this kind of moth-eaten suit. He’s very shopworn and very jaded, as they would have been at this point in the conflict. This is sort of more of an espionage film than an action-packed Hollywood thriller. The suspense, which grows and becomes uncomfortable, it’s built out of character and choice, not directorial set-pieces.”

That the film was shot in Dublin adds to its interiority. Mr Marsh makes a virtue out of necessity. Dublin does a convincing impression, its red-brick, Victorian inner city mirroring the streetscape of Belfast’s infamous trouble spots; the grim and grassy wastes of Dublin’s blighted suburbs ring true, too. Yet, because we can’t have any landmarks or the inevitable shots of sectarian murals, the film is forced to adopt a muted tone, and to focus more on the domestic and the psychological. The strong cast, led in the supporting roles by the brilliant Brennan and a menacing David Wilmot as a faine-and-tweed-wearing IRA commander, all flesh out their roles, giving penetrating performances that invite in viewers.

Marsh is on familiar ground directing a thriller. His previous films include The King, which he calls “a thriller of sorts, an uneasy film about a man who sets out to destroy a Christian family in Texas”; and Red Riding 1980, his contribution to Channel 4’s excellent trilogy of Yorkshire Ripper films, from 2009. Yet Mr Marsh is best known as a documentarian, and has two classics under his belt: the Oscar-winning Man on Wire, chronicling Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center; and Project Nim, about an idealistic, doomed attempt to investigate the language capabilities of chimpanzees.

Mr Marsh’s experience as a documentarian manifests itself as a certain ruthlessness when making feature films.

“The big skill-set you take from documentaries is efficient storytelling,” he says. “In a documentary, you’re dealing with real life, which is more untidy and unwieldy than a written screenplay, so structure is everything. It makes you rigorous about structure in a narrative film.

“My take on the script was to make it much shorter, much tighter. The original screenplay was quite epic, and, for one thing, I knew we couldn’t afford to do it. But, more importantly, the premise of the story was Colette’s betrayal of her family, and that I felt should be in the foreground of the story.”

Shadow Dancer is economical: there are no subplots, and a single, unbroken tone is sustained throughout. This is made possible by the almost suffocating way in which the film follows its characters into their world, rather than standing back and depicting it. The camera often lurks behind the characters, peering over their shoulders. “Subjective experience: that was our deliberate choice,” Mr Marsh says. “You see a lot of the film through Colette’s eyes and the camera shows you the world through her eyes. Therefore, you begin to have a more intense experience of her predicament. You really become more invested in her dilemma.”

Mr Marsh says his objective was to “keep you in a grip” for the entire film. In this he succeeds. A thriller like Shadow Dancer, he says, is a director’s medium. “You’re dealing with manipulation of audience, how you disclose information and withhold information. You’re dealing with emotions that I find very interesting: anxiety, fear, dread, suspicion, paranoia. Those are feelings I know about, I guess, and feel able to put on screen in a certain kind of way.”

* Shadow Dancer is on general release