by Damien Spiccia
Worth: $16.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Edna O’Brien, Jessie Buckley (narrator), Anne Enwright, Doireann ní Ghríofa, Gabriel Byrne
Intro:
... more than just the life of a singular Irish writer; through O’Brien, it captures the bold, groundbreaking emergence of a generation of Irish women stepping out from the devout, conservative shadows of repression, shame, and Magdalene laundries into prominence and power.
With Blue Road: The Edna O’Brien Story, director Sinéad O’Shea offers a wide-ranging and engaging tribute to maverick Irish writer Edna O’Brien, who died in 2024. The documentary is shaped by the same unflinching honesty and conviction that defined O’Brien’s work.
Narrated with cool authority by Jessie Buckley, drawing from O’Brien’s memoirs and diaries, Blue Road opens to the stirrings of Debussy over images of rural Ireland, the foundation of O’Brien’s fiction.
O’Brien recalls her childhood in County Clare, where the most exciting pastime was watching lorries pass twice a week through nearby Scariff, a “one-horse, one-hotel town, with 27 pubs.”
Feeling stifled, O’Brien moved to Dublin with hopes of breaking into the male-dominated world of Letters. There, she entered a tempestuous marriage with fellow writer Ernest Gébler. Amid a post-war Ireland grappling with censorship and social transformation, she began work on her controversial debut novel, The Country Girls.
As her international standing grows, O’Brien fights for independence, both from the resistant Irish press and within the walls of her own home. She divorces Gébler and enters her bon vivant era, rubbing shoulders with Richard Burton, Marlon Brando, Sean Connery, Judy Garland, and the cream of 1960s haute bohème (Gabriel Byrne notes that “everyone and anyone went to [O’Brien’s] parties”). As the years pass, O’Brien grapples with loneliness and depression, yet continues to produce trailblazing, challenging works that spotlight the inner turmoil of women.
Blue Road features revealing interviews with O’Brien’s sons, Carlo and Sasha, writers Anne Enwright, Doireann ní Ghríofa, and O’Brien herself, at 93, graceful and softly-spoken yet as erudite as ever, alongside a treasure trove of archival footage. This includes clips from screen adaptations of her work, such as the 1983 TV film of The Country Girls, The Girl with the Green Eyes (for which O’Brien herself wrote the screenplay; and starring Australia’s own Peter Finch), and Night, a short adaptation made by Carlo during school holidays.
O’Brien’s story is steeped in the pervasive Christian ethos woven into the 20th-century Irish social fabric – she even recalls a vivid moment from her childhood when the Virgin Mary stepped out of a painting to instruct her to “be good.” But, as in O’Shea’s previous film, Pray for Us Sinners, this rigid religious orthodoxy masks the darker realities that Irish women have endured under a hyper-conservative nation where gendered oppression is dominant and final. When O’Brien refused to sign away her royalty cheques in exchange for a meagre allowance, her husband responded with violence. The men in the media, too, take her critiques of patriarchy with a derisive scoff. When O’Shea asks O’Brien whether she has received sufficient support in processing the trauma of this overt sexism, she dabs her neck with a handkerchief and quietly replies: “No… No, no, no, no, no.”
Ultimately, O’Shea’s film traces more than just the life of a singular Irish writer; through O’Brien, it captures the bold, groundbreaking emergence of a generation of Irish women stepping out from the devout, conservative shadows of repression, shame, and Magdalene laundries into prominence and power. After O’Brien shares her final thoughts on camera, the film circles back to that pastoral Arcadia of her youth – not as a place of nostalgia, but as a foundation for resilience and renewal. As O’Brien herself puts it, that’s “no bad thing.”
