The 93-year-old Irish writer, who died in July, is the subject of a simple, lyrical-inflected portrait, including final interviews with O'Brien and people who knew her.
Plot Summary, "The Country Girls" by Edna O'Brien in 5 Minutes – Book Review
"I was looking for the glitter for a while. And I don't regret it. But I know it wasn't the real thing. It wasn't the real thing." This sentiment, which could almost be poetry or song lyrics, is spoken by Edna O'Brien in one of her final interviews, which appears toward the end of director Sinéad O'Shea's riveting documentary. "Glitz" is an understatement: the film opens with a kind of roll call of O'Brien's celebrity friends, with the celebrated Irish author in her prime rubbing shoulders with the likes of Paul McCartney, Shirley MacLaine, Sean Connery, Jane Fonda, Judy Garland and Laurence Olivier. In fact, she rubs shoulders with some of them: Romantic conquests include Robert Mitchum. Yowza.
After the razzle-dazzle prologue designed to interest newcomers with the promise of famous faces, the film itself begins, tracing O'Brien's more humble roots in County Clare, Ireland, where she was born in 1930. As soon as she is old enough, the young woman heads for the big city of Dublin, which at that time represents for O'Brien all that is worldly, cosmopolitan, fashionable and culturally exciting. She scores her first magazine column, 600 words a week on topics suitable for a female readership, and meets a fellow James Joyce fan some 20 years her senior, which causes problems when her family learns of the affair through the wonderfully old-fashioned device of an anonymous letter on a bicycle saddle. An attempt to pressure her at home fails and she marries him. This sets the stage for one of the film's recurring themes: O'Brien's attachments to various undeserving men.
Combining evocative archive footage, audio (Jessie Buckley reads her letters and diaries) and new interviews with speakers (including Gabriel Byrne and O'Brien herself), director O'Shea offers an accessible glimpse into a life seemingly lived to the full. "I learned the hard way to know what I had, to defend my own position and to stop apologizing," O'Brien says in an interview. She's mostly talking about her personal life, because in the footage we see of her on talk shows and the like, she's anything but apologetic toward her various interlocutors—mostly male hosts who embody the status quo prejudices of their respective eras. In response to then-current questions, such as whether the children of "broken homes" inevitably suffer, she cuts a calm, defiant figure. "I don't think they're traumatized at all. I think they're only traumatized when they're neglected."
