It's shaping up as a good month of March for the Irish.
Jim Sheridan, writer, producer and director of "The Boxer" has his film shown as the opening film in the Berlin Film Festival and compatriot Neil Jordan's film "The Butcher Boy" took out the Golden Bear Award.
"The Boxer" is a strong and unsentimental film with love and loyalty at its heart. It doesn't avoid the harsh realities of life in embattled Belfast, but nevertheless it manages to reveal moments of joy along the rocky road to peace. Significantly women are portrayed as integral to and an active force within the society.
This is a society of strong and conflicting loyalties which make it not unlike the prison that Danny Flynn (Daniel Day-Lewis) is released from in the opening sequences.
The central performances are great with Daniel Day-Lewis and Emily Watson (Breaking the Waves) in the lead as childhood lovers brought together after a separation of fourteen years. Their love rekindled they search for a way through the violence and conflicting loyalties that surround them. In Jim Sheridan's multi-layered script, their story is integrated with that of the people of Belfast and comes to represent the struggle between personal integrity and loyalty to partners, to family, to Church to the Cause.
The supporting characters are equally well portrayed. Maggie's father, played by Brian Cox, is a local IRA leader. Ike Weir plays the boxing trainer who helps Daniel Day-Lewis resurrect his career.
"The Boxer" is a strong and unsentimental film that confronts the complexities of life in present-day northern Ireland and, being less confronting than Sheridan's earlier film "In the Name of the Father", should get a wide general audience.
And an unashamedly nationalistic postscript: "The Castle", recently screened at the Sundance Film Festival and came away with a cheque for a reported $US6 million from Miramax. Not bad for a film whose budget was only $US450,000!
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