SYRFILM closes with Argentine feature, The Irish Prisoner

The Irish Prisoner/El Prisionero Irlandés (2015, RT 100 min.)

Directors: Carlos Jaureguialzo & Marcela Silvay y Nasute

Cast: Alexia Moyano, Tom Harris, Alberto Benegas

     One special pleasure of this annual SYRFILM is the return to festival screens of movies from Argentina, which have been absent for several years but helped create the momentum of the festival’s beginnings a dozen years ago. Visually lush, with high production values and terrific performances of depth and nuance, Argentine cinema is a rapidly acquired taste. Originally the festival scheduled three Argentine features; although one dropped out, the two remaining close out the Palace’s Sunday evening program. Daniella Goggi’s Abzurdah (2015), based on a popular autobiographical novel and breaking box office records this year in Buenos Aires, screens at 5:00 PM. At 7:00, there’s the historical drama The Irish Prisoner, whose lead actress, Alexia Moyano, who’s been here at the festival since Wednesday, will do the Q&A.

     Overhsadowed by the more recent Falkland Islands skirmishes between Argentina and the UK, England’s ill-fated attempts to invade Argentina and take Buenos Aires in 1806 and 1807 are sometimes called collectively “the forgotten invasion.” They occurred in the context of the Napoleonic Wars in Europe, in which Spain and France allied against England. The immediate aim was to hurt the French-Spanish alliance by wounding Spain through her South American colonies, but the longer goal was potential access to South America’s vast wealth if trade could be established. Both attempts fell pitifully short: the initial invasion of the Plate River basin in June 1806 was repulsed in about three months, and 1807’s May invasion collapsed even quicker. But the Argentine militias who successfully defended themselves against the British both times created a sense of national identity and fueled a nascent independence movement. Three years after the second British attempt, Argentina had formed a home-rule government and in 1816, declared full independence; by 1826, similar rebellions in Chile, Peru and Ecuador, aided by Argentina, effectively ended Spanish dominance on the continent.

     The Irish Prisoner begins in 1806 in the tiny settlement of La Carolina in the mountains of Argentina’s San Luis province with the funeral procession of Ambrosio Ochoa, which stops at his humble farmhouse, now occupied by his widow Luisa (Alexia Moyano), her farmhand Sixto (Alberto Benegas), and her young son. Ambrosio’s death, it is whispered, will promote this idea of independence, and Ambrosio’s somewhat dandified brother is intent upon marrying Luisa, taking over the land and taking his brother’s widow and son back to the capital with him. Luisa will have none of it, though she sleeps with a rifle, and struggles mightily to manage a farm with only an old man and a child for help.

     We come upon this family tragedy after the English invaders have been repulsed and cool their heels as prisoners. One such lot is kept in a stable in town; rumors fly about their execution as they’re moved inland away from the harbor and dispersed in the countryside to prevent their rescue or escape.

    The Irish prisoner of the title is Conor Doolin (Tom Harris), deeply at odds with his commander, who provokes him constantly with the epithet “Croppy.” It turns out there was a heavy percentage of Irish among this invading force. 1806 is just eight years past the Irish rebellion of 1798, memorable for who made up the United Irishmen – both liberal non-Anglican Protestants (mostly Presbyterians), some of them well-to-do, inspired by the American and French Revolutions, and Irish Catholics, making common cause against the British. It was this alliance that the British sought to destroy in sowing dissension among the two faiths, a legacy that persists even today in some quarters. Martial law in ’98 created generations of antipathy following house burnings, torture, and some mass murders on both sides.

     Conor Doolin’s father was a member of the United Irishmen (he carries a metal pin with him throughout the story which he eventually passes on to his own son). So it is this backdrop against which Conor Doolin reacts when his sergeant sneers at him as “Croppy,” an epithet based on the close-cropped haircuts that were a statement by French sympathizers among the Irish during the 1790s – enough to get one arrested in some places. But not enough to keep the Irish out of conscription into English military service. Though Conor indignantly claims he's "no Croppy," he later lectures an old farmhand about how the English stole Irish land.

     In fact – just as happens in The Irish Prisoner – some of the captured English troops of Irish extraction were given the option to stay in Argentina and chose to do so. Nearly 300 of them settled there instead of going back to Europe, later joined the fight for independence, later still assisted other anti-Spanish rebellions on the continent too, both intermarrying with Argentines and establishing an eventually sizable community of Irish who hosted others who followed them to settle.

     As a film, The Irish Prisoner is nowhere near as didactic as I have just been! In fact, the story of Luisa and Conor established the barest of factual scaffolds with this history. But the scaffold the film does establish is sound and accurate and the film has such a sweetness about this long-brewing romance, which has its share of sorrows – Luisa must meet another funeral procession at her gate, hunching against the cold wind with her thin shawl, twice more – that one can’t help appreciating that such a film was clearly made as a labor of love and remembrance.

     Conor gets from his rude, make-shift prison to Luisa’s farm because of a horrible storm that nearly wrecks her homestead and from which she might not recover if her old farmhard, Sixto, had not asked the town commander to send her some help. Captain Lucero protests he has too few man already but he could send one of the English, who in turn send the least of their number. Conor agrees, and appears at Luisa’s doorstep to do the hard labor of clean-up and re-building, sleep shivering outside with Sixto, and participate in a hesitant approach between himself and Luisa’s young son. The Irish harbors dreams of escape, of course, secretly panning for gold nuggets, asking as he starts to learn the language in which direction is the sea, and seeming to plan a theft of Luisa’s small band of horses. Conor has a way with horses, and these remind him of the hardy Connemara ponies from home. The work of caring for horses provides the medium in which his work with old Sixto grows and the means by which they must learn one another’s language. They begin with “horse.” When the season grows cold, Conor teaches Luisa “snow.” The characters in this film talk because they must talk, often comically not understanding a word the other says and clearly finding one another extremely odd, until gradually comprehension dawns.

    So of course the homestead gets into Conor’s bones and under his skin. He marries Luisa after some years, they have a boy too, and the call to fight for independence comes a number of times, taking its toll. We leave Luisa at her gate, where she began those years ago.

    It would hard to resist the rough but somberly beautiful mountains of La Carolina, which landscape time and again dwarfs the characters with its sheer mass and huge sky. Americans can read this film easily as a kind of Western, as a settlement of wilderness, but there’s enough strangeness in the landscape to evoke a sense of the uncanny in us that sets us, as watchers, on alert. The performances are uniformly excellent and because these actors are also unknown mostly to American audiences, this also provokes a new attention. Alexia Moyano is particular brings an emotional clarity and ease to her performance which makes actresses in similar roles seem mannered in the extreme.

You’ll want to watch The Irish Prisoner a second time too. That’s why I’ll be in the audience at the festival’s closing Sunday night.