Irish film
director Neil Jordan's new movie about a quirky 1970s quest
for personal identity against a background of violence,
Breakfast on Pluto, stands in contrast to the
new, thriving Ireland. It's enough to make Jordan feel
nostalgic. "Ireland is turning into Norway," says
Jordan, sardonically likening the rising affluence and
dwindling political tensions at home to what he views
as a bland Scandinavian backwater. "The country I grew
up in hadn't changed since the 19th century. It definitely
hadn't changed since James Joyce wrote
Dubliners," Jordan told Reuters in a recent
interview. "Now it has transformed totally."
Jordan says he
feels like a stranger in the booming "Celtic Tiger"
economy and hardly knows what to make of the cultural
landscape with the fading of the centuries-old "troubles"
now that the Irish Republican Army has scrapped its
weapons. "You've got all these ancient tribal
conflicts finally put to rest," Jordan said.
"Everybody's employable. Everybody's got jobs. And what
then? I suppose you need a kind of satirist like Tom
Wolfe when he wrote The Bonfire of the Vanities to
make sense of contemporary Ireland," he said. "I'm not
sure there are any such voices at the moment."
One of the most
intriguing auteurs on the Irish scene in the last two
decades, Jordan has examined the issue of terrorism and
rebellion in his first film, Angel (1982) as
well as The Crying Game (1992), Michael
Collins (1996), and again in his new movie.
Breakfast on Pluto, the centerpiece of the
ongoing New York Film Festival, is a black comic fairy tale
that follows the journey of an abandoned Irish child
who grows up to be a transvestite and journeys to
London in the mid 1970s in search of his lost mother
and a life of his own. Patrick "Kitten" Braden, played
by rising Irish star Cillian Murphy, is open, naive, and
unafraid to confront the dangerous realities that
bombard him and his world.
That is what drew
Jordan to adapt the novel by compatriot Patrick McCabe,
despite superficial similarities to The Crying
Game, a thriller that won Jordan an Oscar for Best
Screenplay and involved the IRA and a transvestite in
a central role. "I was really 'trepidatious,' if
that's a word, about addressing an issue like that
again. Then I thought the character was so on the side of
the angels that there can be no doubt where the heart
of the film stands. He's the only character able to
speak clearly, unequivocally, and kind of bravely on
all the issues. Incredibly brave and impossibly naive at the
same time. I liked that about it, clear about the
issues."
While Jordan may
miss some of the Ireland he knew best, he says the
decommissioning of the IRA is extraordinary. "It is an
extraordinary event, where a fearsome army, which it
was, willingly disbanded itself," he said. "Whatever
comes out of it, I don't know. I don't quite trust a
lot to do with it, but it is an extraordinary thing."
Jordan said Irish
writers will have to shift gears. "It is so weird, to
have been writing and working out in your brain what you
feel about this fight full of conflict and paradox. It
is so weird to see it so different. I don't know what
to say. Maybe I'm not a part of it. Conflict and
badness are easier to write about than goodness," he said.
"I think it's confusing, soporific, and strangely
happy."
The filmmaker,
who has written four novels and made 15 movies, said
"rampant capitalism" had transformed the country. "Ireland
has changed so much. You know what changed things quicker
than anything is rampant capitalism," he said. "Give
it about two years and it will transform a country
inside out. Let money flow and--bam--suddenly
'I'm talkin' on my mobile phone to my third wife,' "
he said with a U.S. Western twang. "That sort of
thing."
Jordan, who plans
another novel after last year's publication of Shade,
said he thinks he might concentrate more on making
movies and writing directly for the screen. The 55-year-old
Jordan even admitted he had tried his hand at capturing the
new Ireland but was not sure he would go forward with
the project. "I've written a script, but I think it'd
be too savage, and I don't think I'd be able to live
there anymore, and I do like living there, you know?"
(Reuters)