I continue this journey of bringing the best from the realms of music, cinema, encapsulating a world of culture, with this reprise of A LETTERED SOUL.
Let this journey begin with a melody of words and the constancy of thoughts.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
What happens to a fragile being when the foundations of amity which had been the last unsullied frontier, nourishing one's mundanity and survival within its praxis, are severed? What if your closest confidante, the one you poured your heart to along with pints of the local drink, chose to shunt you away, as if you were a liability? Fully grown adults have a lot to answer to themselves, to their conscience and to the discomfiting stirrings they harbour here in this instance.
The answers to workings of the human mind hardly ever suffice. One man's painful epiphany, of being almost nothing in the course of his life so far, is offset by his buddy's fledgling ambition. The sting in the tale is at once distinctly local to this picturesque Irish backwater. But it's alarmingly universal because loss of a network of amity, a mutual bond can entail a fate worse than enforced solitude. You can choose your friends and they always tend to establish a family, an unsullied frontier against which all of life's regrets can be defeated.
Martin McDonagh's THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN is concurrently about the love shared between siblings where nothing of a depressive shade can really eclipse the sanctity of blood bonds.
Of course, the heart wants so much more than being nothing in a one-horse town. The soul demands nourishment. Ambition or the lack of it is, under such circumstances, a casualty. Crossing over to the other side, for the sake of creative discipline, for the sake of an Identity, to escape parental abuse and the rank imagery of genders and location is at the heart of this melancholic, visceral, heartbreaking original scenario where the pithy cast rises to the occasion and then some.
They are victims in the sense that the place they call home has held them by their throats all their lives. The juxtaposition with the innocence of animals and the elegy for a friendship that can no longer suffice are fodders for the universality of this work. Loss is oftentimes a sudden brigand. It has a way to assault our collective senses and upend our notions. Nowhere has that been more organically realised than here.
At another more disturbing level, THE BANSHEES OF INISHERIN is about the impact of masculinity and our implicit violent tendencies that perhaps spring from our place within the most elusive corners of the map.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
