SINÉAD O'SHEA: BLUE ROAD - THE EDNA O'BRIEN STORY (2024)

Portrait of an Irish writer, sensuous, glamorous and embittered

This is a beautiful film at many points. Period footage of Ireland and of people is continually painterly and sunlit. The voices have an Irish lilt. The effect is pleasing and magical. BUt the central personality, Edna O'Brien, an Irish woman writer of unusual notoriety and success, author of 34 books, is often dark and provocative. Her voice is soft, but she has an edge. She lived a glittering life in London, dining with Jacqueline Onassis or Joan and Laurence Olivier, made love to by Marlin Brando, hung out with Sean Connery. Familiar classical pieces - a mass, the Barcarole from Tales of Hoffman, Debussy - accompany picture-perfect images of the Irish countryside where she felt safest. She says this in her last days (she died July 27, 2024 at 93), in the course of a long and interesting interview completed after a hospital stay. She was eloquent up to the last.

Life in her early days was never easy for O'Brien, but she was clearly a great talent and the fact that her first novel was banned in Ireland only insured her work would always be sought after there. She chose difficult men and met with public resentment of her success as a woman and the bold sensuosity of her books. Later a glittering existence fueled by fame and big publisher's checks showed a taste for company and partying and a host of famous friends.

At the outset of O'Brien's career, her Czech-descended Irish-born husband Ernest Gébler, with whom she had two children, both boys (and heard from), forced her to sign over the checks for each of her early novels in turn to him, and keep only a small fraction for household expenses. She accepted this at first. The film shows us contemporary pact between Irish Church and State made considering women virtually chattel an accepted commonplace of Irish life. But the checks kept getting bigger, and O'Brien used them to take her children and live separately - where she reports they were happy. One check for £39,000, equal to over $430,000 in the early Sixties, was enough to buy the house in Carlyle Square, London SW3, where she gave fabulous parties. Her spendthrift ways eventually made her so poor she was led to sell that house later for £235,000, very, very unwise because five years later it was worth £5 million. Her gift was not for real estate.

Some of O'Brien's experiences with men, first among them Ernest Gébler, made her embittered. In a memorable little TV interview clip played here, when asked about her feelings concerning men, she says, "Well, in my long life" (though she isn't old at this point) "and my experience with men I may have chosen the wrong ones, but I do think they are shallower than women. I don't think they have nearly the same grasp on truthfulness. And" she goes on, "they expect a woman to be a goddess, to be a whore, to be a mother, and nowadays to be a breadwinner. So the only thing I think is nice about men is the occasional sexual pleasure they give us and nothing else." A bleak view! But from the sound of it her pleasures were not so occasional and a Guardian obituary piece calls her love affairs "legendary." Ron Rosenbaum, writing for Smithsonian, calls O'Brien "one of the literary world’s great chroniclers of love. Of love and longing and the desperate lives of souls in the pitiless grip of passion and doomed elation."

This film, though rich in images and clips of O'Brien at various stages, is neither detailed in recounting the love affairs nor very specific about either the content or the style of the books she wrote, nor is the film assiduous in giving dates. But we do gather in passing that her novels set a whole hew standard for fiction by women in Ireland; she may have had a social as well as a literary influence.

She slso became a patient of the controversial psychoanalyst R.D. Laing, as part of which she took LSD with him, in a dosage so potent she was dazed for weeks afterward.

A screenplay she repudiated the results of was made into a 1972 movie called Zee & Co. starring Elizabeth Taylor, Michael Caine, Susannah York.

Later on she wrote a trilogy about the Troubles - some criticized her for doing this as one not from Northern Ireland, but she approached this period from the point of view of the whole island; and later, she wrote about Bosnia in thinly disguised portrait of the genocidal Serb politician Radovan Karadžić.

She had a passionate love affair with an English MP (never seen or identified) who she refers to as "Lockinvar," who eventually abandoned her. A passage of her writing about this evokes the prevailing loneliness of her love life.

Running out of money despite continuing to have glamorous friends led O'Brien to wind up teaching at City College of New York, where she taught Walter Moseley (later ofDevil in a Blue Dress) and as his writing teacher for 1988-89. He recounts that she would take your story home wit her and then "just study it, study it, study it," then read it aloud herself in class. And "Edna reading is just extraordinary," he says, "just so beautiful and engaging." - and, he explains, enlightening in a special way for the student writer. The clip of her reading a story at this exact moment indeed is convincingly beautiful and engaging and one imagines might be enlightening for the fledgling writer. She simply told Moseley point blank to go and write a novel, he says, and we hear her saying so as. well. It was a pivotal moment for him; it saved his life, made him who he is. It was not long afterward, presumably, that he wrote Devil in a Blue Dress.

This story dramatic transformation is almost worth the whole film, but then there is the marvelous, eloquent old lady who emerges fully at the end of it. Not everything is here, but a great deal is, and this is a striking film. Its usual clips and interviews are presented with great taste and elegance. It might make you read Edna O'Brien, or if you already have, might lead you back for more of those 34 books.

Blue Road - The Edna O'Brien Story, 99 mins., debuted at Toronto, Sept. 7, 2024. Opening night film at DOC NYC Nov. 13, 2024 , for which it was screened for this review.