Luke: New film shot in Fingal set for release in cinemas

In a cramped kitchen, Catherine (Anne McCrudden) gathers her family for an awkward lunch. 

The camera is planted at the opposite end of the kitchen table, centering Catherine in the frame. 

She mostly looks down at the table, away from her children. When she does look up her gaze is fixed on the middle distance. 

She is recently widowed and reeling from a series of worsening revelations about her late husband’s business and personal affairs.

Flanked on either side by her sons and daughter, Catherine sits boxed-in by the past as she struggles through the present. 

Their children were as unaware as Catherine about the massive debt their father had accrued, and about his infidelities. 

They were also unaware of the man their father was in the last years of his life – they knew nothing of the emotional abuse that Catherine endured. 

This all spills out in a monologue that serves as a centrepiece and highlights McCrudden’s acting ability. 

So rapid and numerous are the problems that Catherine is facing in the wake of Michael’s death that she now appears to be working through the stages of grief in front of her children.   

The actors may not be standing around the kitchen sink but the writing is very much of that type: grounded, dramatic, biting, and sometimes funny in its realisation of Catherine’s airing of grievances.  

Towards the end of the scene, Catherine puts her children in their place when they protest her selling their family home. Who can help her? Her children can’t provide for her: one’s a teacher, another a writer, the only one with money is “financed up to here”, she says. 

Catherine makes short work of their protests as only a mother can, but the sense is that it’s not something she wants to do, her hand has been forced, compelled by forces out of her control like so much of the action in the film.

Emerging from loneliness

Unlike this first scene, much of Sunphlowers, director Dave Byrne’s feature debut, focuses on McCrudden in isolation. Finding herself alone in her family home and up against an increasingly bleak confluence of her husband Michael’s poor decisions. 

But the thrust of the plot sees Catherine warming up to the community around her. Inviting people into and filling up a lonely life. Never quite overcoming the obstacles in front of her but adapting and accepting happiness where she can find it.

Throughout the film Byrne’s camera frames and follows Catherine in tight claustrophobic close-ups with a particular focus on her body language. The action is mundane by design. Catherine picks tomatoes, hunts and pecks at a laptop, fills bin bags with heirlooms and keepsakes. 

Byrne cuts from the busywork of grief to shots of Catherine’s home looking cramped, but at the same time, too big, too empty. It’s a quiet, unsettling atmosphere. The lights are hardly ever on even at night. No need for them, in between daytime cleaning and sleepless nights alone in the dark.

McCrudden’s theatre background makes her physicality a large part of Catherine’s characterisation. It’s not what she says but how she carries herself that gives a truer view of her feelings. 

It’s seen in the interplay between Catherine and Patrick Bergin’s character, Tony. Tony was a year ahead of Catherine in school; they first meet again, after many years,  in a park a day or so after Michael’s death.

McCrudden is all hunched shoulders and furrowed brow here – bothered by Tony’s chit chat. 

Their gradual reconnection and enrollment in a local art class is at the centre of Sunphlowers. (The film’s title is taken from Catherine’s painting Sunphlowers with a ‘ph’, a rare moment of whimsy for her.) 

McCrudden adjusts her posture and expression as Tony becomes more and more an important part of Catherine’s life.

“Geezer pleaser”-ish

You may have heard the term “geezer pleasers” or “geezer teasers” to describe a movie. 

Usually action films featuring older actors showing the world they’ve still got it. Pensioners with pistols, week-long running time westerns, movies like they used to make ’em. 

Sunphlowers is not exactly a geezer pleaser or teaser but it does have something in common with the more easygoing, old dog, new tricks, feel of those films.

The support and love of friends, family and community pull Catherine through despite the constant and considerable obstacles put up by systems and bureaucracy. 

When her Plan B doesn’t take off, it’s a noble failure. And through a clever bit of superimposing we see Catherine’s art life and real life melding in a memorable and moving final sequence. 

As a wife and mother, Catherine had so much of her happiness and worth tied-up in other people. Dave Byrne in his writing and directing shows the gradual emergence of a new purpose in Catherine’s life. 

At the close of Byrne’s film, she stands surrounded by sunflowers. Dreams and reality cross over with a camera dissolve. A life left on hold while other things happen can finally begin again.

Sunphlowers is set for release in cinemas from 26 September.