“The Banshees of Inisherin”: an epic that sublimated the critics of Mask & the Feather

The film presented by Jérôme Garcin

A great film about a story of friendship between the Irish filmmaker and playwright Martin McDonagh, to whom we owe “Kisses from Bruges” already starring Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson. Could be Beckett. On an isolated island in the Irish Sea, two lifelong friends, Pádraic (Colin Farrell) and Colm (Brendan Gleeson), remake the world by drinking Guiness. We are in 1920, the civil war is raging in Ireland and then one day, Colm who is a musician decides to break up. “I don’t think I love you anymore,” he says to Pádraic, who refuses the verdict and tries to put the pieces back together with the help of his sister and a disturbed young islander. But it is in vain. And the more one persists, the more the other rears up, mutilates his fingers one after the other. He says MacDonald took as a model “The Night of the Hunter” and then the westerns of John Ford, Celtic version.

Pierre Murat salutes “a very great film”

For the critic of Telerama it is a film of very high quality, a marvel that does not shrink from any cinematographic requirement: “The film also made me think of Nathalie Sarraute’s “Pour un oui pour un non” since here too everything starts from one word and everything becomes tragic. Here, it is a gesture in question, a “I don’t love you anymore, I don’t want you to talk to me anymore“. There is a guy who wants to devote himself to his art. It’s a bit ridiculous at the same time. Then the other character who is there to drink shots with his mate. From there, the director mainly the courage – in a cinema that is still sometimes well-meaning – to go all the way, stopping at nothing to the point that it becomes more and more tragic and absurd. the quality of dialogue, the way the dialogue is resumed, the lines come back, but without being quite the same. Without forgetting the role of the sister of one of the characters who is absolutely magnificent as she wants to get out of it without anyone really knowing if she will get there.

The only small and light reserve would be the banshee in question, that is to say this character of a witch who certainly resonates a bit like fate but who is a bit heavy. Otherwise it’s a marvel.”

Michel Ciment applauds a great filmmaker

It is a very, very great film whose presence in pole position for the Oscars is, according to the journalist of the review Positivecompletely justified and deserved: “Let us remember that the Venice jury gave him the screenplay prize, which is very well deserved because we must not forget that the filmmaker Martin McDonagh is a dramatic author. As well as the comedians, Colin Farrell, acting award that Brendan Gleeson equally deserved. They represent two generations, with this older man who wants to devote himself to music, showing a certain nastiness, which is an ironic look in the eye of the director.

This is the arrival of a very great Irish filmmaker who films sublimely shot landscapes here, with references to John Ford, to “The Quiet Man”. It’s a great, wonderful film.”

For Sophie Avon it is “an absolutely sumptuous humanist, metaphysical epic”

The journalist for South West was completely overwhelmed by the overall beauty of a film that she sums up in two words, absolutely “crazy” and “magnificent” and “how, with such a simplistic, if not playground, stake (“Je ne t’aime more, I don’t want to see anymore”) its director manages to deploy such a universal, solid, tragic, vast film! Especially since as the stakes become more complex, this whole island – which never talks about the war civil which thunders in the background – acts in the background as well as this endogamous community completely asleep which gradually wakes up, reveals itself and cracks. Then suddenly people become more and more intelligent. Pádraic, who has a heart of incredible innocence, holds a sensational speech at one point in front of Colm, then suddenly it is a question of Mozart, of metaphysical things, of transmission, of creation. This film, we do not know how, starts from nothing and gives birth to a humanist epic, Absolutely sumptuous metaphysics. It’s crazy!”

For Xavier Leherpeur, “it’s one of the greatest films of the year”

It is truly one of the greatest films in terms of direction and screenplay of this year according to Xavier, who is all the more delighted that the director is gradually managing to strip more and more of the elements that could once leave desire and spoil the construction of his films: “Already “Bruges”, it was very worked, very dialogical, but there there is a stripping which goes perfectly with the character, with the situation, they are silent, at worst musicians , but the word is not theirs, even when they drink together. There is this kind of culture of silence which will become a kind of issue within the film because silence, the character will keep it, which creates a metaphysical and spiritual suspense on which the film is based.

It’s remarkably written and performed.. Without forgetting the character of the sister (Kerry Condon) who is a formidable character, this little whippet character also interpreted by (Barry Keoghan) fragile, son of an abusive policeman and who also tells his own story in a tragic way.

There is no finality or resolution, there is an amplitude, a magnitude, a universality in the subject such that it is absolutely necessary that you go there”.

The film

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