Joyce Fegan: How a Quiet Girl captured the heart of a nation

'An Cailín Ciúin' makes us nostalgic for the better parts of an old Irish summer.

Sometimes our consumption says a lot more about us than our utterances. Whether it's the most popular item in the nation's shopping basket (we all buy a lot of tomatoes), or what's top of the book charts, we get to see who we are through our actions, individual culminating in the collective.

Since early May, the Irish-language film An Cailín Ciúin ( The Quiet Girl) has been making lots of noise in the cinema.

 It's now well into its second month on the silver screen and is headed towards €1m in box office takings, having taken in €800,000 so far — shattering all records for an Irish-language film.

It's received a slew of awards from the critics, there's Oscar talk and its world rights have just been picked up by Bankside Films — but industry aside, it's individuals who have given this movie their resounding stamp of approval.

Just what is it about The Quiet Girl?

Based on the multi-award-winning writer, Claire Keegan's short story Foster, An Cailín Ciúin is the story of an Irish childhood summer — set in Wexford of 1981.

A girl is sent to live with unfamiliar relatives while her mother gives birth to yet another child in a dysfunctional family home. Her summer in Wexford entails baking, cleaning, daily trips to the well for water, a moonlight walk to the beach, a wake, a trip to Gorey for ice cream and clothes — from which there is even change. Every night the girl and her "foster parents" sit down to watch the nine o'clock news, after which she always goes to bed.

The rhythm of an unremarkable routine is the container of this powerful story. In the midst of peacefully-completed communal chores, long evenings, and safe silences, a summer-to-remember is created

"This is a different type of house," the young narrator says in the story, "here there is room to think".

Enduring appeal

Set in 1981, originally published in 2010, to much acclaim, and now a major motion picture 12 years later, the appeal of An Cailín Ciúin endures, despite the passage of time.

There are stalks of rhubarb for baking, spuds to be spayed and terms of endearment like "leanbh" and "petal" used, all set against a backdrop of poverty in a socially conservative Ireland. These characters lived in an Ireland where condoms were accessed via a GP prescription. It would be four more years before you could buy them over the counter. Big families were plentiful, even if food, material goods, and college fees were not. That is not an uncommon experience and Ireland of the '80s is not a distant memory.

When an Irish-language film released in the height of summer without a Hollywood star to pitch out for interviews, nor a huge budget for marketing, does this well, you know its story has resonated deeply with society

Why?

The movie-goers making this film a box office record-breaker, do they recall being sent away to an aunt for the summer, freed from the tensions of their family home? Do they resonate with the loving care they received from virtual strangers, nearly forgotten about, until a similar story appears on the silver screen?

But maybe it's something far more benign than poverty, dysfunction, and financially-imposed neglect, maybe it's just the baking.

In an economy where you can buy a tea brack for less than €1 in the low-cost foreign supermarket in your town, there's something about those rhubarb stalks and summer.

In the story of this quiet girl, they are a people who are still connected to the land and the weather and the seasons and what the three produce in unison.

“I’m snowed under with rhubarb, whatever kind of year it is," says the foster mother, Mrs Kinsella, at the start of the story. And at the end of it, the young girl's mother has made tart with the stalks that Mrs Kinsella sent down to her earlier in the summer.

There's an appreciation gleaned from pulling fruit and turning it into a shared treat, that you just don't get from 99c supermarket brack.

With the advent of social media, aspirational living has become the almost invisible backdrop to our lives, but in this story, it is wholesomeness, simplicity, and connection that has us buying tickets to see the show

It's also summer, a time for being outdoors, at festivals, reconnecting with old friends and extended family, long days out and later bedtimes.

With news of heatwaves and weather warnings, articles about how to expertly pack a picnic for the sandy beach, summer 2022 is giving us the opportunity to have a summer like our childhoods, and An Cailín Ciúin makes us nostalgic for the better parts of an old Irish summer.

Adults who had happy childhoods, now with children of their own, are currently in the business of wanting to recreate the summers they fondly remember. And adults whose childhoods were perhaps not so favourable get to find resonance in this tale of temporary summer love in the midst of longer-term dysfunction.

There's a thing you hear a lot from Hollywood, that certain movies just won't get made. So expert are the directors and financiers in the hearts and desires of the ordinary Joe Soap, they just seem to know that certain stuff will not sell. Stories don't get financed, don't get made, don't get told.

A scan of Netflix and you'll see the usual stories of gore, action, true crime, estate agents, missing women, and of cults where men had 12 wives and 67 children.

Then along comes An Cailín Ciúin. And the punters vote with their wallets and word of mouth.

It all started with a story of a different name, published in print, but there's something about The Quiet Girl and its rip-roaring success that tells us of the kind of stories that actually matter to us, that we choose to leave the house to see, not just stream on the TV. Perhaps it's Irish audiences and creatives, and not Hollywood execs, who are the better barometer of the kind of stuff that sells on the silver screen in the age of social media and streaming.