Film review: Swing Bout by Cork director is a no-frills affair
Sinead O'Riordan stars as Emma and Ciara Berkeley as Toni in Swing Bout
- Swing Bout
- ★★★★☆
- Cinematic release
Boxing is sport pared back to the bone, so it’s entirely appropriate that (15A), which is written and directed by Cork’s own Maurice O’Carroll and filmed in Páirc Uí Chaoimh, is a spare, no-frills affair.
Pacing the tension-filled communal dressing-room like a caged lynx, not knowing if she will be called for a swing bout (a fight tossed into the televised schedule at short notice if a main fight comes to a premature end), ‘Terrible’ Toni (Ciara Berkeley) is a lean, mean, fighting machine primed to wreak havoc on her mouthy opponent, ‘Vicious’ Vicki (Chrissie Cronin).
What Toni doesn’t know is that her coach and mentor, Emma (Sinead O’Riordan), has already sold out to the Casey brothers (Ben Condron and Frank Prendergast), the boxing promoters who have already decided that Vicki will win the bout.
There’s a cash prize at stake, of course, which the sticky-fingered Casey brothers will dip into as a matter of course, but O’Carroll’s script makes it clear that the bout means much more to Toni than money or a shot at the Big One — Toni has private problems that money would go a long way towards solving, but proving herself a winner on her own merits is a matter of personal and professional pride.
Ciara Berkeley is excellent here, combining a superb physical performance as the razor-sharp young boxer with a more nuanced psychological approach: she may be hard-edged and hyper-focussed, but there’s something endearingly naïve and wide-eyed about Toni too, in that she still (somehow) believes that life is a meritocracy where hard work and talent will get you where you need to be.
Berkeley gets terrific support from Chrissie Cronin, who steals a number of scenes as the arrogant, trash-talking Vicki, and from Sinead O’Riordan (who also produces) as the manipulative svengali whose hardboiled pragmatism rips Toni’s dreams to shreds and delivers the kind of knock-out blow that Toni couldn’t have imagined in her worst nightmare.
Maurice O'Carroll's direction delivers a clear-eyed and unsentimental account of one woman’s bitter experience of the sweet science, while Mark O’Connell’s camerawork in the sweaty, claustrophobic confines of the dressing-room floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.
