Christy – Film Review
by Hugh Maguire

Director – Brendan Canty
Writer – Alan O’Gorman
Stars – Danny Power, Diarmuid Noyes, Emma Willis

Reggie of the Blackrock Road and his fellow Captains of Cork Industry have certainly given us a social media perception of Norries – residents of Cork’s North Side.  The Norries have their own Facebook page, too!  Christy, the subject of this beautifully performed and delicately calibrated film, is a product of the neighbourhood.  There is a lot that conforms to stereotypical perception, not dissimilar in a way to Alan Parker’s The Commitments (1991).  Just as there we had the ‘bleedin Dubs’ with a colourful turn of phrase, here now we have a Cork hip-hop influenced equivalent.  It is definitely Cork – and Cork with a vengeance.  One wonders how the uninitiated will understand the turn of phrase, not to mention the local dulcet tones.

Christy himself is no stereotype.  The film opens with seventeen-year-old Christy being turfed out of a foster home, where a bout of physical violence on his part has understandably made him fall foul of his foster parents.  With no choice but to live with a sibling – a half-brother – he is forced to face his fast-arriving 18th birthday with no obvious skills, no education, few options, and an almost tongue-tied personality. There are flashes of temper and displays of his obvious strength, which, given the circumstances, could easily be adapted to the rougher end of crime, petty or otherwise.  But the inner gentleness wins over, and there are touching scenes of his innate ability to deal with infants and to attract new friends.  A bit like the Miley Byrne (Mick Lally) character in the still much-missed Glenroe, Christy is something of a magnet to the opposite sex, from mothers through to his peers.  He exudes, it seems, a need for mothering and care.  All the women want to hug him and listen to his worries.  There is obviously a back story, and the siblings must come to terms with each other for a start, having spent much of their respective lives in residential institutions or foster care.  The deceased mother is omnipresent and remembered by many, but not Christy. Then there are dodgy wider family members who could all too easily set Christy off on the wrong path.  The brother shows his concern in trying to get Christy settled somewhere safe – even as ‘far away’ as Tralee, which is made to sound like a Soviet-era gulag!  But just as Romeo exclaims: ‘There is no world without Verona’s walls….’, it is clear that for Christ,y there is no life beyond Cork.

On the one hand, the film is a harsh social realism look at a part of Cork that is far from a tourism idyll.  The locals may appear to have kissed the Blarney stone, but there is nothing picture postcard–like about their locale.  So-called urban planners and city councils have a lot to answer for, as is all too apparent in a streetscape that suggests desolation.  Despite this, and still managing to stay shy of sentimentalism, there is a sense in which a solid community ultimately depends on the affection between locals and their shared stories.